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General Editor 

LINDSAY TODD DAMON, A.B. 

Professor of English in Brown University 



ADDISON — Sir Roger de Coverley Pavers — Abbott 

ADDISON AN7J ST'E^US.— Selections from The Taller and The Spec- 
tator — ABBOTT t 

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RUSKIN — Sesame and Lilies — ^Linn 

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Greever 

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SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 

CHICAGO: 623 S.Wabash At*. NEW YORK-. 8 East 34th Street 



Z^t Hafee tn^liif) Claggicsi 



REVISED EDITION WITH HELPS TO STUDY 



Sesame and Lilies 

BY 

JOHN RUSKIN 



EDITED FOR SCHOOL USE 
BY 

J. W. LINN 

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 



SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 
CHICAGO . NEW YORK 



..lP 






Copyright 1906, 1920 
By Scott, Foresman and Company 



©CU571752 



ROBERT O. LAW COMPA sY 

EDITION BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
CHICAGO. U. S A. 

JUL 26 1920 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 

The text of Sesame and Lilies here presented 
is that of the Brantwood edition, the recognized 
American edition. I have included Buskin's own 
preface to the edition of 1882, as undoubtedly help- 
ful in understanding the man and his book. The 
notes are fuller than could be wished. In the case of 
the Biblical allusions, for example, I should have 
preferred to leave the identification to the student as 
part of the ^'^intense reading*^ that Euskin eloquently 
urges. But I have quailed before the cry of ''insuffi- 
cient time,'' which comes from high-school teach- 
ers of English everyw^here. Only a few parallel pas- 
sages are adduced from Ruskin's other works. His 
message was, as I have tried to point out, so single, 
so constantly recurred to in all his writings, that his 
works may almost be said to be made up of a series 
of parallel passages. Only when what he has said 
elsewhere has served in some fashion to explain what 
he says here, have I cited it. How the student is 
to use the noteS/may safely be left to the individual 
teacher. But one thing it seems wise to urge, and 
urge strongly — that not a word of the lectures them- 
selves be read until the first two sections of the Intro- 
duction have been talked over carefully in the class- 
room. This is to reverse the ordinary procedure. 



6 EDITOR'S PREFACE 

But whoever reads Euskin without knowledge of the 
man himself is likely to be so affected by his dogmatic 
way of putting things that the value of what he says 
is minimized. 

For valuable assistance in the compilation of the 
notes^ I am indebted to Mr. James R. Hulbert, of the 
University of Chicago^ J. W. L. 

Chicago, 190G. 



CONTENTS 

^ PAGE 

Preface 5 

Introduction 

Ruskin 's* Life 9 

Ruskin's Political Economy 27 

Ruskin 's Style 29 

A Brief Bibliography 35 

A Chronological Outline of Ruskin 's Life and 

Princij^al Writings . . .^ 36 

Preface to the Edition of 1892 37 

Sesame and Lilies , 41 

Notes . . o . . . o o 147 

Appendix * 

Helps to Study ....... .o,. . 161 

Theme Subjects ..... o ... .o. 165 

Selections for Class Reading . . c o o . . . 166 

, Chronological Table . c c o c . <, <, o . . 167 



INTRODUCTION 

I. 

Buskin's Life. 

John Euskin (born 1819, died 1900) had a singular 
youth. Until he was seventeen and went to Oxford 
he was absolutely sheltered from the world, knowing 
almost no one outside of his ow^n family. Even at 
Oxford he lived under the careful eye of his mother, 
who left her home and husband in London to watch 
over her only son. Aware only of his own small 
circle, of which he was conscious all the while that he 
was the center; extremely precocio.us, with gifts and 
powers far above the ordinary; — living, in his own 
words, ^^a very small, perky, contented, conceited^ 
Cock-Eobinson-Crusoe sort of life,^^ he fastened, upon 
himself at this time a kind of shell ("conceit,'^ he 
calls it, but it is not that), which he never wholly 
got rid of. And though he was personally the most 
gentle and generous of men, his writings show 
an almost querulous dogmatism which is repel- 
lent to those who do not know his life as whole — 
his consistent sweetness, sensitiveness, and modesty, 
and his passionate earnestness for what he believed 
to be the truth. It brought upon him abuse 
and ridicule, and plunged him into controversy 
which in the end wore down his body and wore out 

9 



10 SESAME AND LILIES 

his brain^ so that he died a shattered and broken old 
man. Yet had he lacked the intensity of belief 
which plunged him into conflicts and extravagances 
of opinion, he would, probably, have lacked also the 
generous ardor which breathes from all his writings, 
and which makes them among the most vital things 
in English literature. 

He was born in London of Scotch parentage, both 
his father and his mother having come from Edin- 
burgh. His father, John James Euskin, was a 
wholesale wine dealer, a man of quiet habits, great 
industry and prudence, and considerable education; 
and in particular, as his son wrote over his grave, 
'^an entirely honest merchant.^^ Although he began 
business without capital and with a considerable 
legacy of debts, by his straightforwardness and knowl- 
edge of details he became the head of his trade in 
London and amassed a comfortable fortune. 

It was, however, Euskin^s mother who possessed, 
for good or bad, the greatest influence over the boy. 
If not of stronger character than her husband, she 
was more persistent, surer of herself. Euskin him- 
self says, ^'^My father ... had the exceed- 
ingly bad habit of yielding to my mother in large 
things, and taking his own way in little ones.^^ 
She was systematic, serene, devoted, but rigid in her 
views. She surrounded her husband and her deli- 
cate son with an atmosphere of peace which was 
for their physical welfare, but she quietly ruled 
the lives of both. "My judgment of right and 
wrong, and powers of independent action," says 



^ INTRODUCTION 11 

Ruskin^ "were left entirely undeveloped; because 
the bridle and blinkers were never taken off me. 
. . . The ceaseless authority exercised over my 
youth left me^ when cast out at last into the world, 
unable to do more for some time than drift with its 
vortices/' It really left him with a worse disability 
than this. Euskin never drifted ; but he consistently 
decided great matters upon instinct, and withdut suf- 
ficient consideration; and though his instincts were 
always fine and very often right, this habit plunged 
him into many difficulties and made much of his 
work a kind of Penelope's web which he had con-- 
stantly to undo and begin over again. 

Indeed the picture he gives of his childhood in 
his autobiographical Praeterita is a little depres- 
sing. Eefused aJl playthings except first a bunch of 
keys, and later a cart, a ball, and some wooden 
bricks; in his whole childish recollection given 
nothing to eat '^of the dainty kind" except three 
raisins and the bottom of his father's half-eaten 
custard ; Sunday made "a horror'^ that "used even to 
cast its prescient gloom as far back in the week as 
Friday"; and finally, "steadily whipped" if he was 
troublesome — all this seems drear enough. It was, 
of course, the early 1820's, when children were to 
be seen and not heard, and when utter and unques- 
tioning obedience was considered the sole standard 
of morality for the young. We must not forget, 
either, that Mrs. Euskin, though she gave her son, as 
he complains, "nothing to love," retained his entire 
and tender devotion to the day of her death. Her 



12 SESAME A>sD LILIES 

system of education sprang logically from her char- 
acter and her strict evangelical beliefs. 

And to that stern training at least one element of 
Euskin's power as a writer may be in part traced; 
it was in these early days that the boy secured that 
sound and permanent knowledge of the Bible which 
was of great value to him latcr^ both in shaping his 
phrases and in cultivating the powers of his mind. 
No other recent writer in English makes such con- 
stant and effective use of the Bible for reference and 
illustration as Euskin, and certainly no other recent 
writer had such a training in it. "My mother forced 
me," he says^ '^'^by steady daily ioil^ to learn long chap- 
ters of the Bible by heart ; as well as to read it every 
syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, from 
Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year." In 
,this reading she made him pay most careful atten- 
tion to expression, forcing him to attend closely to 
every word; and in this way she developed that 
power of intense and analytic reading which in the 
lecture "On King^s Treasuries" he urges upon us all. 
For his other early reading, besides a few of the 
child's books of the day, he had the Waverley Novels, 
all read aloud by his father, and Pope's translation of 
the Iliad of Homer; and on Sunday he was given 
Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim's Progress, It 
was a sound, if a small, collection. 

This very steady-going childhood was relieved, 
however, during the summers, by family driving- 
tours through England and even up into Scotland, 
forty or fifty miles a day, to secure orders in his 



I 



INTRODUCTION 13 

father's wine business. He tells^of riding in the 
forepart of their ponderous chariot^ behind big glass 
windows^ which gave ^ him an unobstructed view of 
exactly half the landscape; of their visits. to "a gen- 
tleman's house ... or better stilly a lord's — or 
best c" all;, a duke's" — visits which left him satisfied 
with his own small home as a place to live in, but 
which roused and increased his delight in archi- 
tecture, in fine lines and great masses, and made the 
sight of castles thenceforward an inspiration to him. 
"And at this day," he whites in Praete7'ita, when he 
is nearing seventy, "though I have kind invitations 
enough to visit America, I could not even for a 
couple of months, live in a country so miserable 
as to possess no castles!" 

By the time he was four years old Euskin's ex« 
traordinary talents began to show themselves. When 
he was having his portrait painted, he ^ was asked 
by the artist what he preferred for the background 
of the picture, and replied without hesitation, "blue 
hills," which he rightly regards as an unusual answer. 
The letters that he wrote at this age are marked not 
only by correctness, but by some individuality. By 
seven he was writing poetry, and illustrating it as^ 
well; already his parents had begun to dream of a 
great future for him. At nine he was apostrophizing 
in verse a famous Cumberland mountain of his ac- 
quaintance : 

"Skiddaw, upon thy heights tlie sun sliincs bright, 
But only for a moment; then gives place 
Unto a playful cloud which on thy brow 



14 SESAME AND LILIES 

Sports wantonly,- — then floats away in air, — 
Throwing its shadow on thy towering height ; 
And, darkening for a moment thy green side, 
But adds unto its beauty"' — • . . . 

— lines which are equally remarkable for their smooth- 
ness, and for that close and accurate observation of 
nature which Euskin later insisted should always 
be the distinguishing mark of the poet and the 
painter. About this time, too, he acquired an- 
other interest which he never lost — geology, and 
in particular mineralogy. Wandering about the 
Welsh hills with his father, he collected and ex- 
amined '^specimens'^ with the greatest zeal and intel- 
ligence. If his parents had left him there, without 
family supervision, with some Welsh mountaineer 
for guide, and a Welsh pony for a companion, "they 
would have made a man of him,'^ he thinks, "and 
probably the first geologist of his time in Europe." 
But it was not thus that his career was to turn. In 
this period he began also systematically to cultivate 
his drawing, had a drawing-master (of whom he 
thought little) and continually made sketches. 

This eagerness for drawing and for mountaineer- 
ing determined his parents, when the boy was 
about fourteen, to abandon their usual summer trip 
through England and substitute a journey upon 
the continent. They went, "in the then only pos- 
sible way, with post-horses, and, on the lakes, with 
oared boats,^' through France, Germany, Switzer- 
land, Northern Italy, Switzerland again, and so home 
throug^h France — a vova^i^e which ]:e savs "excited all 



INTRODUCTION . 15 

the poor little faculties that were in me to their 
■uttermost/^ and gave him "more passionate happi- 
ness than most people have in all their lives/^ It 
was but the first of a series of journeys; thence- 
forward^ as the elder Euskin^s" affairs were now most 
prosperous^ the family went thus^, year after year, 
over much the same paths, each journey confirming 
the sensitive, impressionable, ardent child more deeply 
in his love of nature and of the art that tries to re- 
produce nature, and enabling him to cultivate 
more effectively the powers of the keenest eye and 
"the most analytic mind in Europe/^ All the 
while he w^as drawing, landscape and architecture 
both — architecture had by now become a "violent 
instinct'^ with him; — and was studying geology and 
mineralogy in a miost eager, intelligent, and unre- 
mitting fashion. 

Such was his boyhood; such were the influences 
and training that helped to make him the man he 
subsequently became. The two great defects in Bus- 
kin's message to the world were, first, that he was 
unable to see any beauty in modern life, and second, 
that he seemed to most of his auditors a terrible scold. 
And the reason for these defects is easy to discover 
when one scans this childhood, in which natural scen- 
ery held such a dominating place, and in which an im- 
pressionable boy, conscious of intellectual powers far 
superior to those of all the circle round him, was grad- 
ually hardened in the belief that because he saw so 
much more than they, he must see more than anybody. 



16 SESAME AND LILIES 

In the autumn of 1836, when Euskin waA seven-' 
teen, he was notified to present himself for matricula- 
tion at Oxford, where his name had long been down 
on the lists of Christchurch, the most fashionable of 
the Oxford colleges. By this date Euskin had already 
begun publishing, in a very small way; he had writ- 
ten the first of his long series of passionate defenses 
of the English painter Turner and the kind of 
painting of which Turner was a leading exponent: 
and he had determined with the utmost definiteness, 
as he tells us, what his work in the world was to 
be — "my destiny fixed in all of it that was to be 
sacred and useful.'^ This same year also, 1836, 
marks the beginning of an episode of four years' 
duration which had a considerable infiuence upon 
his life. Just before he went to Oxford, his 
father^s business partner, il. Domecq, a Frenchman 
living in Paris, brought his four younger daughters 
to England to stay a month or two with the Euskins, 
who were then at Heme Hill, a London suburb. 
John Euskin fell deeply in love with Adele, - the 
oldest; " four days, at the mos^, it took to reduce m,e 
to ashes.'^ She never cared for him in any way, and 
laughed at his poetic declarations, as well as at the 
spelling of a seven-page French letter he subsequentlv 
wrote her. He saw her only once more, two years 
afterward. Yet when in 1840 he heard the news 
of her engagement to a Baron Duquesne the shock 
of the news affected him most painfuUv; he fell ill. 
left the university, and began a restless two-years^ 
w^andering about Europe. Throughout his whole 



INTRODUCTION 1? 

V 

life, indeed^ Euskin was peculiarly susceptible to the 
influence of women. His nature was in some re- 
spects, as he confesses/^feminine/'and moreover he had 
been brought up in his mother^s shadow. To men 
certainly he was the most affectionate of friends, and 
he was far from being the kind of man who continu- 
ally fancies himself in love; but underneath his 
dogmatism lay an extreme and romantic sensitive- 
ness which was often repelled by the' touch of any 
nature with coarser fibers than a woman's. 

Except that his university career was broken into 
by illness, it was successful. He made friends, won 
the Newdigate prize for poetry, and after his long 
illness and wanderings, took an honorable degree. 
This was in 1842. His mother had desired him to 
enter the ministry, but for this he had no taste. He 
set himself upon a career in literature instead, and 
promptly sat down to write his first book. 

He was twenty-three when this first book, the first 
volume of Modern Painters, was brought out. It 
was, in substance, an assault upon the generally ac- 
cepted formal traditions of landscape painting, an 
appeal to painters to go back to nature and draw 
exactly what they saw, and a glorification of Turner, 
the English artist, who, Euskin thought, did do 
just this. It contained novel ideas splendidly ex- 
pressed. It was crammed with originality, en- 
thusiasm, cocksureness, and beauty. It touched five 
hundred different matters, and threw new if not pure 
white light on every one of them. And in ail these 



18 SESAME AND LILIES 



things it was entirely characteristic of the many 
works that were to follow. 

It was attacked in various quarters; but on the 
whole it was favorably received^ and the boy was 
accepted into the fellowship of men of letters. He 
was urged to go on with his discussion of the canons 
of art, and determined to do so. He felt, however, 
that he mnst have more training. Accordingly he 
made a sixth visit to his beloved Alps, and a 
year later jonrneyed to Italy, to Florence! Pisa, and 
Venice. And here, as he was constantly doing 
• throughout his life, he made a discovery which 
startled him out of some of his old convictions. He 
found that there had been great painters before 
Turner; that the superiority of modern painters in 
landscape was not so demonstrable after all. In 
his new volume, therefore, he now drew his illustra- 
tions chiefly from the work of the Florentine and 
Venetian schools, and in particular from the Vene- 
tian, Tintoretto. This second volume appeared in 
1846. It made him famous at a blow. And yet a 
period of deep depression followed it, brought on by 
weariness, ill-health, and another brief but on his 
part vivid love affair, this time with Walter Scott^s 
granddaughter. 

Two years later he was married. The marriage was 
arranged chiefly by the parents of the two concerned 
and was a marriage merely in name. His wife was 
a Miss Gray, the daughter of old familv friends. 
She was charming and extremely beautiful, but her 
interests and Euskin's were very different. Fond of 



1 



INTIIODUCTION 19 

Bociety and gay people^ she found the brilliant young 
author moody and over-studious; she admired him, 
but she did not love him. At the end of five years 
she was granted a divorce by mutual consent. Neither 
marriage nor divorce had any serious effect on Eus- 
kin^s career; he seems to have be6n no more in love 
with his wife than she with him. Seven years before 
their marriage, when Euskin was just twenty-one, 
she had challenged him to wTite her a fairy-story, 
and he had answered her challenge with one of the 
best an Englishman has ever produced — ^^The King 
of the Golden Eiver.^' It is perhaps for this, rather 
than for her marriage to him, that Miss Gray will 
be best remembered in Euskin's history. From the 
time of the annulment of the marriage Euskin con- 
tinued to make his home with his parents, and to 
submit peacefully to their domination in all every- 
day matter's. Both lived to be old, his father dying 
in 1864 at the age of seventy-eight, his mother in 
1871 at the age of ninety. 

The year after his marriage, that is, in 1849, Eus- 
kin, shifting his comment from painting to archi- 
tecture, published his Seven Lamps of Architecture; 
two years later, tlie first volume of his Stones of 
Venice; and in 1853, the second and third volumes 
of the same work. In these books, he first attempted 
to do for architecture what he had already tried to 
do for painting, i. e., to^show what principles really 
lie at the bottom of the art, and how they should be 
applied. There are seven of these principles, he says, 
Truth, Beauty, Power, Sacrifice, Obedience, Labor, 



20 SESAME AND LILIES 

Memon^ In laying them down he also lays down his 
theory of the intimate relation of Life to Art; he 
makes clear how^ to his mind^ it is impossible that 
great painting or great architecture should be the 
product of any but a people great morally ; how pure 
and powerful artistic forms cannot spring from any 
but the pure and powerful in heart and deed. And 
this theory he presented with so much vigor^ beauty, 
and enthusiasm that it became at once widely known. 
In this same theory we find an explanation of the 
great change which Buskin's interests were soon to 
show. Hitherto we have heard of nothing but Eus- 
kin the art-critic. How did Euskin the critic of art 
become Euskin the critic of life and morality? The 
transition is abrupt, but plain. He believed passion- 
ately in beauty ; and he believed as passionately that 
only people who lived beautiful lives could under- 
stand beauty or produce beautiful things. Modern 
conditions, he held, flew straight in the face of all that 
was beautiful in art and life ; and modern conditions, 
therefore, be set himself to attack, with all the fire 
of the spiritual reformer. This change in his pur- 
pose was not to be clearly evident for some years yet; 
but Frederic Harrison^ points out a paragraph, in 
the second volume of Stones of Venice, which may 
almost be called prophetic. 

^"Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked 
lite cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet re- 
main in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to 
smother their souls within them, to blight and hew 

^John Ruskin: p 76. 



INTRODUCTION 21 

into rotting pollards the suckling branches 'of theii* 
human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin which 
after the worm's work on it is to see God, into 
leathern thongs to yoke machinery with, — this is to 
be slavem asters indeed; and there might be more free- 
dom in England, though her feudal lord's lightest 
words were worth men's lives, and though the blood 
of her vexed husbandmen dropped in the furrows of 
her fields, than there is while the animation of her 
multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory 
smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to 
be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into 
the exactness of a line/^ 

"This/^ comments Mr. Harrison, ^^is to wander far 
from the palaces of Venice. But it is to come very 
close to the Social Democracy of today.'' It is here 
that we see the new path opening to Ruskin — the 
path that was to lead him into ridicule and scorn, 
but the path he could no more help treading than he 
Gould help urging others to it. 

In the years immediately following the publication 
of the Stones of Venice Euskin began to give lectures 
on various topics; wrote many articles and several 
books, including a manual of di-awing; concluded the 
three final volumes of Modern Painters; and in gen- 
eral exhibited that restless activity which is one char- 
acteristic of a nervous temperament. Until the end he 
was always either working himself into a fever or 
recovering from its effects. In 1857 he published 
the first of his ^^social" criticisms, as distinct from 
his "artistic" criticisms. In these years, also, he 
grew deeply interested %i the movoTvient which was 



22 SESAME AND LILIES 



then beginning to spread education among working- 
men — a movement which exhibits itself today in 
University Settlements^ University Extension, and 
the like. It was not, however, imtil I860, when he 
was forty-one years old and famous throughout 
Europe as an art critic, that he definitely thrust him- 
self forward as a social reformer by the publication 
of the essays subsequently called "Unto This Last/^ 
These essays, published in the ''Cornhill Maga- 
zine,*" of which Thackeray was editor, w^ere in sub- 
stance a violent attack on some then accepted prin- 
ciples of political economy. Political economy, ac- 
cording to Euskin, assumes that w^e are all machines, 
are a mass entirely calculable in our actions, governed 
in set ways by set principles. This, he says, is ut- 
terly false, because it fails to take into account the 
soul of the individual, the "very peculiar agenf ^ of 
"a quite unknown quantity,^' which, entering into the 
political economist's equations without his knowl- 
edge, "falsifies every one of their results.'' Four 
papers were published; then the opposition of the 
public became so strong that publication was stopped. 
Euskin was called crazy and ridiculous, even his own 
father, who had been hitherto the foremost of his 
son's admirers, standing aghast at these new theories. 
Such opposition naturally had great effect on a 
nature so sensitive as Euskin's; he was shaken and 
torn this way and that by emotion; but the ultimate 
result was that although he became gentler and more 
retiring in his private life, in his writings he grew 
still more insistent and dognpitic. 



1 



INTRODUCTION 23 

In the spring of 1864 his father died, leaving to 
him the responsibility of managing a fortune of more 
than three-quarters of a million dollars. 

In December of the same year, 1864, when he was 
forty-iive, he delivered at Manchester, for the benefit 
of certain charities, the two lectures, *^^0f King's 
Treasuries,^' and *^^0f Queen's Gardens,'' which were 
subsequently combined in book form under the some- 
what fanciful title of Sesame and Lilies, This little 
book marks no turning-point in Buskin's life; nor 
is it to be regarded as of more than minor im- 
portance in his long and varied literary career. It 
concerns itself primarily neither with art nor with 
economics, the two great topics of his lifelong preach- 
ment. But precisely because of the generally wider 
appeal of its subject-m^atter, and because of its com- 
bination of plain, homely truth and eloquence, it has 
been the most steadily popular of all its author's 
minor works. It is an axcellent introduction to 
Ruskin; though unless it is supplemented by some 
study of his life and character and the task he set 
himself, it is likely to be misunderstood. 

He went on lecturing, writing, fighting against 
odds for the truths he saw so plainly, making mis- 
takes, scorning compromises, setting up ideals that 
were impossible, even if they were wise, but stick- 
ing fast always to the one central truth that no na- 
tion could advance except by advancement in the 
character of the individuals that composed it. He 
organized the Guild of St. George, with its vows 
of honesty, kindliness, simplicity, and usefulness, 



24 SESAME AND LILIES 



■ 

lots™ 
:: on V 



and its practical object of acquiring various pL 
of ground^ to make them beautiful, and of carrying 
industries there without the employment of machin- 
ery and its accompaniments of noise^ smoke^ and 
danger. He set up a model shop or two^ and a pub- 
lishing house^ on the principle of offering a sound 
article at a fair price^ without rebates or advertising 
or middlemen of any kind. He accepted a professor- 
ship of Fine Arts at his old University, Oxford, and 
at intervals lectured there for fifteen years on many 
of his favorite topics. He wrote for many years 
(1871-1884) a series of monthly open letters to work- 
ingmen, partly autobiographical, largely eeonom^ic, 
which aroused great interest as well as great oppo- 
sition over much of Europe. He gave away his 
whole fortune, living on the profits of his writings. 
In many ways he was impractical; he saw some of 
his theories break down, and understood the reason 
for their failure; but as a vital stimulus to a higher 
and better life, Europe knew scarcely any greater 
force throughout all of these last years of his career. 
He never went back to his art-criticism as such. His 
Oxford lectures, ostensibly on the fine arts, are in 
fact a series of exhortations to goodness and truth ; 
and the story which is perhaps best known of h^'s 
professorship is that on one occasion he led h's 
students out to a stretch of roadway that was in 'great 
need of repair, and spent the day with them repair- 
ing it. 

In 1871 his mother died, and he moved from the 
vicinity of London to Brantwood, on Lake Coniston, 



INTRODUCTION 25 

in Cumberland, not far from Grasmere, the old home 
of Wordsworth. His health was steadily failing. 
Attack after attack of brain fever weakened him. 
Yet from 1884 to 1889 he produced what is certainlj 
the most charming, and probably to the general reader 
the most interesting, of all his books — Praeterita — ^the 
story of his life; a work which is certain to remain 
one of the classical autobiographies in English. It 
was his last work. In the remaining ten or ekven 
years of his life he published nothing. His 
strength steadily failed. He lived at Coniston in 
almost complete retirement, at first able to walk 
about the grounds of his house, then forced to the 
idleness of the invalid's chair. At last, without suf- 
fering, he died, on the 20th of January, 1900, within 
two weeks of his 81st birthday. 

In personal appearance Euskin was always hand- 
some — as a child, beautiful; winning in middle age; 
and as an old man striking. He was of medium 
height, about five feet ten inches, with rather small, 
keen, yet exceedingly gentle blue eyes. In his prime 
he dressed a trifle unconventionally, but not at all 
as if his clothes were a matter of no moment to 
him. He spoke with the accent of his Scotch an- 
cestry. When he was a child a careless footman 
had allowed him to stoop down to caress a large dog 
while it was feeding; the animal sprang at him and 
bit him on the lip, leaving a scar which never dis- 
appeared. But this, like Thackeray's famous broken 
nose, rather added to the character of the face than 
detracted from it. Of his manner, Frederic Harri- 



26 SESAME AND LILIES 

son says :^ "He was the very mirror of courtesy, with 
an indescribable charm of spontaneous lovingness. 
. . . No boy could blurt out all that he enjoyed 
and wanted with m"ore artless freedom ; no girl could 
be more humble, modest, and unassuming. In private 
life, it was always what he loved, not what he hated, 
that roused his interest.*^ Xeither in his conversa- 
tion, however, nor in his writings, did Euskin show 
any sense of humor. The lack of it was one of his 
chief defects. 

The value of Euskin to the reader, young or old, 
does not lie wholly, or even chiefly, in the advice he 
gives. This advice, though spiritually never wrong, 
often se^jis practically wrong. And it is often 
delivered with a certainty that at once arouses oppo- 
sition. But Euskin's great and supreme merit is 
that he makes his readers iliinJc. If you wish 
simply to be amused and entertained, if you do 
not wish to exercise your brains, you will^ find 
yourself out of sympathy with him. He complained 
with bitter sorrow, at the end, of the iDCople who read 
him for his ^"pretty passages,*^ without trying to un- 
derstand or act upon his message. He demands 
his reader^s whole attention. He is always in 
the lists^ a strong, splendid, chivalrous figure, serv- 
ing with daring and devotion and constancy his twin 
Queens of Truth and Beauty. He throws down 
gauntlet after shining gauntlet at the reader's feet; 
he dashes home his challenging bright spear into the 

^John Rusl'in: p 93. 



I 



INTRODUCTION 27 

very center of the readsr^s intelligence. He is a 
knight to stir the imagination and the blood of all 
who meet him squarely, face to face. 



II. 
Euskin's Political Economy. 

Euskin^s theories of political economy were, as has 
been said, first put forth in the early sixties in a series 
of articles in the ^^Cornhill Magazine/' then edited by 
his friend Thackeray. Subsequently these articles were 
published in book form under the title Unto This Last, 
He held, in his own words, that "There is no Wealth 
but Life." That is to say, the wealth of a country is 
not to be measured by its material possessions, but 
by the powers and qualities of its inhabitants. He 
attacked vigorously the old doctrine of political 
economy that material profit was the only incentive 
to labor and the only standard of economic success. 
An employer, according to Euskin, should look first 
to the welfare of his employees, second to the honesty 
and genuineness of his product; third, and subse- 
quent to* -both, he should consider profit. If, with 
employees working under fair conditions and pro- 
ducing an honest article, neither flimsy nor adulter- 
ated — if under these circumstances a merchant could 
not compete with rivals who carried on their business 
with an eye solely to profit, then he should fail honor- 
ably. In the present state of affairs, Euskin ad- 



28 SESAME AND LILIES 

mitted, such a merchant inevitably would fail. But 
what;, he asked, was such a failure? Was it not akin 
to the failure of the soldier who dies defending the 
flag of his country, or of the sailor who goes down 
bravely with his ship? We call the sailor and the 
soldier heroes; why, Kuskin demanded, should we 
expect heroism from them, and not expect it from 
the merchant? 

Xaturally such ideas as these were not readily ac- 
cepted — they flew too squarely in the face of universal 
practice. Their fundamental honesty and justice Eus- 
kin overlaid, too, with a multitude of visionary and 
impractical suggestions. The result was that for a 
long time he was regarded by many people as a 
dreamer and a fool. Time, however, has ena- 
bled the world to estimate the value of Eus- 
kin's ideas more fairly. Some of his suggestions 
have been shown by the years to be impractica- 
ble and destructive to human progress. Others of 
his contentions, indeed his main contentions, have 
now become an accepted part of the theory of political 
economy, though the older ideas have by no means 
been superseded entirely. But the great value of 
his work in this fleld has been in the stimulus it has 
given to modern thought. Just as his criticism of 
art, though mistaken in parts, over-personal, some- 
times extravagant and inconsistent with itself, was 
nevertheless the starting-point for the new educa- 
tion in art which has spread so widely in England 
in the last fiftv v^cirs. so his criticism of political 
economy, likewise extravagant and sometimes incon- 



LNiTvgDUOTION 29 

sistent, lias inspired a thousand and a thousand 
thinkers, and set them upoB the road which humanity 
must some day travel, to the heights. 



in. 

Euskin's Style. 

Hitherto we have spoken of liuskin as a man and 
as a teacher ; it remains to look at Euskin the literary 
artist. He is remarkably individual in both the com- 
ponents of written expression, namely, structure and 
style. 

The structure of Euskin^s essays is often peculiar 
and difficult to . comprehend. In one sense, it is 
utterly illogical. He seldom proceeds straight on 
toward a definite goal. He is the antithesis of 
Macaulay. With Macaulay (in the essay on Milton, 
for example) one can always make an outline, per- 
fect in heads and subheads, in which each topic con- 
nects itself unmistakably with the next, and all are 
bound up into a solid and perfect whole. All is 
symmetrical and obvious. But with Euskin the only 
law of progress seems to be the law of the association 
of ideas. A point occurs to him, and he sets it 
down, and develops it with wonderful keenness and 
vigor. Then in the course of the development, a turn 
of thought, a phrase, or perhaps merely a word, sug- 
gests to him some other ^point, and he shifts . his 
illuminating comment to that. He may return to the 
original idea, and he may not; if he does so return, 



30 SESAME AND LILIES 

it is often without warning. He is always on the 
alert for new impressions^ and expects his reader to 
be equally so. He repeats himself without hesita- 
tion ; moves on, now slowly, now with resistless speed ; 
cuts in now from this angle, now from that. And 
yet in the largest sense he is logical. For with 
Euskin there was only one thing ultimately worth 
discussing — the need of more beauty and truth in 
our everyday lives. And so, whether he begins, as in 
"King^s Treasuries/' with reading, or, as in "Queen's 
Gardens," with the powers and opportunities of 
women, he is sure to come round before long to this 
one great message of his. • 

The general scheme of the two lectures which are 
included in Sesame and Lilies may well be indi- 
cated here. Euskin's aim in the first lecture, "'Of 
King's Treasuries," he indicates in the first para- 
graph of the second lecture. "The questions spe- 
cially proposed to you . . . namely. How and 
What to Eead, rose out of a far deeper one, . . . 
namely. Why to Eead. ... I wish you to see 
that both well-directed moral training and well- 
chosen reading lead to the possession of a power over 
the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to 
the measure of it, in the truest sense, kingly/' His 
first lecture proceeds, after an extremely skillful in- 
troduction on the value of good books, to define whaV 
a good book, a real book, is, and to tell how it is writ- 
ten. "Whatever bit of a wise man's work is honestly 
and benevolently done, that bit is his book, or his 
pi^ ce of art." Then he proceeds to show how such a 



INTRODUCTION 31 

book should be read ; goes on to point out the im- 
possibility of having any honest and benevolent vi^rit- 
ing or honest and benevolent reading among a dis- 
honest an unbenevolent people;, such as he asserts the 
English of his day are; and finally in his perora- 
tion sets forth an ideal^ and suggests a way of at- 
taining it. 

The second lecture, ^'Of Queen's Gardens/^ is 
among the most orderly of all Euskin's works. His 
statement of his purpose, in his third paragraph, is 
indeed intentionally a little blind ; but his subsequent 
procedure is unlike his usual rambling method. 
He makes three main points: the right of woman, 
according to the testimony of great writers, to a voice 
in the conduct of affairs: the education which shall 
best fit woman to exercise her right; the way in 
which she ought to exercise it. Both lectures must be 
read carefully, if their real trend is to be understood; 
a casual reading will leave the impression of a series 
of interesting but disconnected statements. 

Ruskin's style is entitled to high praise. Of 
.the masters of prose in the Victorian period 
Thackeray was the most graceful, and Carlyle possi- 
bly the most forcible; but it was given to Euskin, 
combining the grace of the one with the terrible vigor 
of the other, to reach in certain passages a height and 
splendor of eloquence attained by no other of his 
time. Not that Euskin stands as a supreme stylist, or 
that he is acceptable as a model; his prose is too 
mannered, too ornamented, too affected even, for 
that; he has the faults of one who lets himself go; 



32 SESAME AND LIT/IES 

he pours out his words with the abundance anr 
splendor of one of his own mountain torrents, foi 
getting that one element of perfect beauty mus 
always be repose. And nevertheless he is at time 
wellnigh unmatchable in prose; and for those pas- 
sages, as well as for the value of his message as ci 
w^hole, he will continue to hold a high place in Enj 
lish literature. 

A student will find great profit in comparing th 
styles of Macaulay^ Arnold^ and Euskin. Each had 
pre-eminently, one of the three accepted quali 
ties of a good style, — Macaulay, clearness; Ai 
nold, subtlety, and Euskin, force. Carlyle was per 
haps more forcible still, but Carlyle sacrificed s 
many things to the attainment of this force that t ■ 
imitate his method of putting things is merely to fa . 
quickly into a thousand faults. Of the three styles 
the most practical, the most merchantable, so t 
speak, is unquestionably Macaulay's. He may almof 
be called the parent of our own every-day written Eng- 
lish. To misunderstand him is impossible. But with all 
his clearness, he lacks shading. A thing is so, or it is 
not so, and there's an end of it; his style makes no 
allowances. Arnold's is just the opposite, so shaded, 
so careful, so fine, that the outlines of his thought 
seen through it have upon them the mist of an i 
finite aloofness. He too is clear, but not with th 
hard, bright clearness of Macaulay. And finally 
there is Euskin, whose principal interest is neither 
in clarity nor in exactitude, but in power. His para- 
graphs are like the roll of thunder, beginning gently. 



.1 



INTRODUCTION 33 

as if in a whisper^, yet with a hint of menace^ and 
then growing in intensity and grandeur till the final 
mighty crash. One may misunderstand Euskin, one 
, may charge him with a lack of clearness and of toler- 
ance^ but one can never charge him with a lack of 
J force. 

The unexpressed motto of the Elizabethans^ of 
Shakspere and his contemporaries, was ^^Be lavish^^; 
the motto of the classicists, of Addison and his 
^ school, was, ^'Be careful/^ That is to say, Shak- 
. spere heaped up his words and Addison selected 
., his. Shakspere, for instance, gives Macbeth the 
. lines, 

^The innocent sleep, 
Sleep that knits up the ravelFd sleeve of care. 
The death of each day^s life, sore labour^s bath. 
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course. 
Chief nourisher in life's feast," — 

. with sheer delight in his own ability to pile one 
. magnificent figure on another. Addison, on the 
other hand, would have preferred to choose one 
figure, the most effective, and to develop that one. 
Now in lavishness Euskin was entirely Elizabethan. 
One of the first things to notice about his style is 
its fluency, its richness. His treasure-house is in- 
exhaustible. He adds adjective to adjective, verb to 
verb, figure to figure, illustration to illustration. He 
abounds in allusions, to lack an understanding of 
which is to fail in getting his whole mean- 
ing. His style is. in fact like a great window of 
stained glass, through which streams the full light of 



34 SESAME AND LILIES 

his ideas in all the gorgeous colors of the rainbow. 
See, for example, the passage quoted on p. 20 of 
this Introduction. 

The form of his sentences is characteristic of his 
defects and his merits as a stylist. For perfect clear- 
ness, they are too long. On the other hand, their 
very length and almost amorphous formation add im- 
measurably to their power. They have the weight 
and plunge of avalanches, and their impact is tre- 
mendous. Compare the amazing passages in para- 
graphs 41 and 92 of Sesame and Lilies, He uses 
short sentences also, but only to give variety; all his 
best-known bursts of eloquence are in the more com- 
plicated form. 

It is trite to say that a man's style reflects the man 
himself, that "the style is the man.'' But the state- 
ment is perhaps more obviously true of Ruskin than 
of most writers of prose. For Euskin is essentially 
emotional; he feels, and then argues to justify his 
feelings. His feelings are always sweeping him 
away, overthrowing the boundary walls of his reserve, 
showing the whole man to anyone who cares to look. 
And this lack of reserve his style faithfully reflects. 
His choice of words, his illustrations, the very form 
of his sentences, are all governed not so much by his 
intellect as by his emotion ; the surging of his nature 
finds a constant echo in the unequal music of his 
style. At its worst, it is congested, vague, even per- 
haps a little wild; at its best, so rich with beauty, so 
instinct with life, that the reader is inspired and up- 
lifted as by splendid poetry. 



INTRODUCTION 35 

IV. 

A Brief Bibliography. 

Praeterita. Euskin's Autobiography, necessary to 
any full acquaintance with Euskin. 

Life of John Rushin. W. P. CoUingwood. 2 vol&. 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The standard biography; 
in parts, however, labored and over-minute but ex- 
cellent. 

John Ruskin. Frederic Harrison. In the English 
Men of Letters Series. The most convenient biog- 
raphy. Clear and scholarly. 

Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning, Anne 
Thackeray Eitchie. Harper's. Interesting sidelights. 

John Ruskin. W. H. Spielmann. Lippincott's. 
Sympathetic. 

John Ruskin, His Life and Teaching. E. J. 
Mather. Warne. 

The Work of John Ruskin, Charles Waldstein. 
Methuen. 

Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Esti- 
mates. Frederic Harrison. Two valuable appreci- 
ations. 

John Ruskin, Social Reformer. John Hobson. A 
careful estimate of Euskin's contributions to politi- 
cal economy. 

Social Ideals in English Letters. Vida D. Scud- 
der. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Three appreciative 
chapters on Euskin. 

Victorian Prose Masters. W. C. Brownell. Scrib- 
ner's. Unfavorable to Euskin's theories of art and 
style. 



3 



A CHRONOLOGICAI. OUTLINE OF RUS- 
KIN'S LIFE AXD PRIXCIPAL 
WRITINGS 

1819. Born. 

1834. First published article. 

1836. Oxford. 

1840. Met Turner. 

1841. First long visit to Venice. 

1842. Took Bachelor 's degree. 

1843. Modern Painters, vol. I. 
1846 Modern Painters, vol. II, 

1848. Married. 

1849. Seven Lamps of Architecture, 
1851-3. Stones of Venice. 

1855. Marriage annulled. 

1856. Elements of Drawing, and Modern Painters, 

vols. III-IV. 
1860. Unto This Last. 
1863. Munera Pulveris. 

1865. Sesame and Lilies. 

1866. Crown of Wild Olives and Ethics of the Dust. 

1867. LL. D., Cambridge. 

1870. Slade Professorship of Fine Arts, Oxford. 

1871. Settled at Brantwood. Guild of St. George 

founded. 
1871-84. Fors Clavigera, • 

1885-9. PraeteHta. 
1900. Died. 



PEEFAOE TO THE EDITION OF 1882 

The present edition of "Sesame and Lilies/' issued 
at the request of an aged friend, is reprinted with- 
out change of a word from the first small edition of 
the book, withdrawing only the irrelevant preface 
respecting tours in the Alps, which, however, if the 
reader care to see he will find placed with more pro- 
priety in the second volume of "Deucalion/^ The 
third lecture, added in the first volume of the large 
edition of my works, and the gossiping introduction 
prefixed to that edition, are withdrawn also, not as 
irrelevant, but as following the subject too far, and 
disturbing the simplicity in which the two original 
lectures dwell on their several themes, — ^the majesty 
of the influence of good books, and of good women, 
if we know how to read them, and how to honor. 

I might just as well have said, the influence of 
good men, and good women, since the best strength 
of a man is shown in his intellectual work, as that of 
a woman in her daily deed and character ; and I am 
somewhat tempted to involve, myself in the debate 
which might be imagined in illustrating these rela- 
tions of their several powers, because only the other 
day one of my friends put me in no small pet by say- 
ing that he thouofht my own influence was much more 
in being amiable and obliging than in writing 
books. Admitting, for the argument's sake, the amia- 

37 



3S ' SESAME AND LILIES 



me ■ 
at I 



bleness and obligingness, I begged him, with some 
warmth, to observe that there were myriads of 
least equally good-natured people in the world who 
had merely become its slaves, if not its victims, but 
that the influence of my books was distinctly on the 
increase, and I hoped — etc., etc. — it is no matter 
what more I said, or intimated ; but it much matters 
that the young reader of the following essays should 
be confirmed in the assurance on which all their 
pleading depends, that there is such a thing as essen- 
tial good, and as essential evil, in books, in art, and in 
character; — that this essential goodness and badness 
are independent of epochs, fashions, opinions, or 
revolutions; and that the present extremely active 
and ingenious generation of J^ung people, in thank- 
ing Providence for the advantages it has granted 
them in the possession of steam whistles and bicycles, 
need not hope materially to add to the laws of beauty 
in sound or grace in motion, which were acknowl- 
edged in the days of Orpheus, and of Camilla. 

But I am. brought to more serious pause than I 
had anticipated in putting final accent on the main 
sentences in this — already, as men now count time, 
old — book of mine, because since it was written, not 
only these untried instruments of action, but many 
equally novel methods of education and systems of 
morality have come into vogue, not without a cer- 
tain measure of prospective good in them; — college 
education for women, — out-of-college education for 
men: positivism with its religion of humanity, and 
negativism with its religion of Chaos, — and the like. 




PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1882 39 



from the entanglement of which no young people can 
now escape, if they would ; together with a mass of 
realistic^ or materialistic, literature and art, founded 
mainly on the theory of nobody's having any will, or 
needing any master; much of it extremely clever, 
irresistibly amusing, and enticingly pathetic; but 
which is all nevertheless the mere whirr and dust- 
cloud of a dissolutely reforming and vulgarly m-anu- 
facturing age, which when its dissolutions are ap- 
peased, and its manufactures purified, must return 
in due time to the understanding of the things that 
have been, and are, and shall be hereafter, though for 
the present concerned seriously with nothing beyond 
its dinner and its bed. 

I must therefore, for honesty's sake, no less than 
intelligibility's, warn the reader of ^^Sesame and 
Lilies,'' that the book is wholly of the old school ; that 
it ignores, without contention or regret, the ferment 
of 'surrounding elements, and assumes for perennial 
some old-fashioned conditions and existencies which 
the philosophy of to-day imagines to be extinct with 
the Mamm^h and the Dodo. 

Thus the second lecture, in its very title, "Queens^ 
Gardens," takes for granted the persistency of Queen- 
ship, and therefore of Kingship, and therefore of 
Courtliness or Courtesy, and therefore of TJncourtli- 
ness or Rusticity. It assumes, with the ideas of 
higher and lower rank, those of serene authority and 
happy submission; of Eiehes and Poverty without 
dispute for their rights, and of Virtue and Vice with- 
out confusion of their natures. 



4u SESAME AND LILIES 

And farther, it must be premised that the book is 
chiefly written for young people belonging to the 
upper, or undistressed middle, classes; who may be 
supposed to have choice of the objects and command 
of the industries of their life. It assumes that many 
of them will be called to occupy responsible positions 
in the world, and that they have leisure, in prepara- 
tion for these, to play tennis, or to read Plato. 

Therefore, also — that they have Plato to read if 
they choose, with lawns on which they may run, and 
woods in which they may muse. It supposes their 
father^s library to be open to them, and to contain 
all that is necessary for their intellectual progress, 
without the smallest dependence on monthly parcels 
from town. 

These presupposed conditions are not extravagant 
in a country which boasts of its wealth, and which, 
without boasting, still presents in the greater number 
of its landed households, the most perfect types of 
grace and peace which can be found in Europe. 

I have only to add farther, respecting the book, 
that it was written while my energies were still un- 
broken and my temper unf retted; and that if read 
in connection with "Unto This Last,^' it contains the 
chief truths I have endeavored through all my past 
life to display, and which, under the warnings I 
have received to prepare for its close, I am chiefly 
thankful to have learnt and taught. 

AvALLON^ August 24th, 1882. 



SESAME A:t!rD LILIES 



LECTUEE I.— SESAME. 

OF KIKGS' TKEASUEIES. 

"You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound.'' 

Lucian: The Fisherman. 

1. My first duty this evening is to ask your par- 
don for the ambiguity of title under which the sub- 
ject of lecture has been announced; and for having 
endeavored, as you may ultimately think, to obtain 
your audiences under false pretences. For indeed I 
am not going to talk of kings, known as regnant, nor 
of treasuries, understood to contain wealth; but of 
quite another order of royalty, and another material 
of riches, than those usually acknowledged. I had 
even intended to ask your a"^^ention for a little while 
on trust, and (as sometime one contrives in taking a 
friend to see a favorite piece of scenery) to hide what 
I wanted most to show, with such imperfect cunning 
as I might, until we unexpectedly reached the best 
point of view by winding paths. But— and as also 
I have heard it said, by men practised in public ad- 
dress, that hearers are never so much fatigued as by 
the endeavor to follow a speaker who gives them no 
clue to his purpose — 1 will take the slight mask off 
at once, and tell you plainly that I want to speak to 

41 



42 SESAME AND LILIES 

you about the treasures hidden in books; and about 
the way we find them, and the way we lose them. A 
grave subject, you will say: and a wide one I Yes; 
so wide that I shall make no effort to touch the com- 
pass of it. I will try only to bring before you a few 
simple thoughts about reading, which press themselves 
upon me every day more' deeply, as I watch the course 
of the public mind with respect to our daily enlarging 
means of education: and the answeringly wider 
spreading on the levels, of the irrigation of literature. 
2. It happens that I have practically some connec- 
tion with schools for different classes of youth; and 
I receive many letters from parents respecting the 
education of their children. In the mass of these 
letters I am always struck by the precedence which 
the idea of a ^^position in life'^ takes above all other 
thoughts in the parents' — more especially in the 
mothers' — minds. ^* The education befitting such 
and such a station in life " — this is the phrase, this 
the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can 
make out, an education good in itself; even the con- 
ception of abstract rightness S^ training rarely seems 
reached by the writers. But, an education " which 
shall keep a good coat on my son's back; — which 
shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors' 
bell at double-belled doors; which shall result ulti- 
mately in the establishment of a double-belled door to 
his own house ; — in a word, which shall lead to ad- 
vancement in life : — fh is we pray for on bent knees 
— and this is all we pray for." It never seems to 
occur. to the parents that there may be an education 



I 



SESAME AND LILIES 43 

which, in itself, is advancement in Life ; — that any 
other than that may perhaps be advancement in 
Death; and that this essential education might be 
more easily got, or given, than they fancy, if they set 
about it in the right way ; while it is for no price, and 
by no favor, to be got, if they set about it in the 
wrong. 

3. Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and 
effective in the mind of this busiest of countries, I 
suppose the first — at least that which is confessed 
with the greatest frankness, and put forward as the 
fittest stimulus to youthful exertion — is this of "Ad- 
vancement in life/^ May I ask you to consider with 
me, what this idea practically includes, and what it 
should include? 

Practically, then, at present, "advancement in 
life '^ means, becoming conspicuous in life' ; obtaining 
a position which shall be acknowledged by others to 
be respectable or honorable. We do not understand 
by this advancement, in general, the mere making of 
money, but the being known to have made it ; not the 
accomplishment of any great aim, but the being seen 
to have accomplished it. In a word, we mean the 
gratification of our thirst for applause. That thirst, 
if the last infirmity of noble minds,^ is also the first 
infirmity of weak ones ; and on the whole, the strong- 
est impulsive influence of average humanity: the 
greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable 
to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the 
love of pleasure. 

[* See Milton 's Lycidas, line 71.] 



44 SESAME AND LILIES 

4. I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. 
I want you: only to feel how it lies at the root of 
effort ; especially of all modern effort. It is the grati- 
fication of vanity which is^ with us^ the stimulus of 
toil and balm of repose; so closely does it touch the 
very springs of life that the wounding of our vanity 
is always spoken of (and truly) as in its measure 
mortal; we call it "mortification/^ using the same 
expression which we should apply to a gangrenous 
and incurable bodily hurt. And although few of us 
may be physicians enough to recognize the various 
effect of this passion upon health and energj^, I believe 
njiost honest men know^ and would at once acknowl- 
edge, its leading power with them as a motive. The 
seaman does not commonly desire to be made captain 
only because he knows he can manage the ship better 
than any other sailor on board. He wants to be 
made captain that he may be called captain. The 
clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop 
only because he believes that no other hand can, as 
firmly as his, direct the diocese through its difficulties. 
He wants to be made bishop primarily that he may 
be called "My Lord.^^ And a prince does not usually 
desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a kingdom, 
because he believes that no one else can as well 
serve the State, upon its throne ; but, briefly, because 
he wishes to be addressed as " Your Majesty ,^^ by as 
many lips as may be brought to such utterance. 

5. This, then, being the main idea of " advance- 
ment in life,^^ the force of it applies, for all of us, ac- 
cording to our station, particularly to that secondary 






SESAME AND LILIES 45 



result of such advancement which we call " getting 
into good society." We want to get into good society 
not that we may have it, but that we may be seen in 
it; and our notion of its goodness depends primarily 
on its conspicuousness. 

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to 
put what I fear you may think an impertinent ques- 
tion? I never can go on with an address unless I 
feel;, or know, that my audience are either with me or 
against me : I do not much care which, in beginning ; 
but I must know where they are; and I would fain 
find out, at this instant, whether you think I am 
putting the motives of popular action too low. I 
am resolved, to-night, to state them low enough to be 
admitted as probable; for whenever, in my writings 
on Political Economy, I assume that a little honesty, 
or generosity — or what used to be called '' virtue " 
— may be calculated upon as a human motive of 
action, people always answer me, saying, '' You must 
not calculate on that : that is not in human nature : 
you must not assume anything to be common to men 
but acquisitiveness and jealousy; no other feeling 
ever has influence on them, except accidentally, and 
in matters out of the way of business." I begin, ac- 
cordingly, to-night low in the scale of motives ; but I 
must know if you think me right in doing so. There- 
fore, let me ask those who admit the love of praise to 
be usually the strongest motive in men's minds in 
seeking advancement, and the honest desire of doing 
any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to 
hold up their hands. (About a dozen hands held up 



46 SESAME AND LILIES 

— the audience, partly, not being sure the lecturer is 
serious, and, partly, shy of expressing opinion,) I 
am quite serious — I really do want to know what 
you think; however, I can judge by putting the 
reverse question. Will those who think that duty 
is generally the first, and love of praise the second, 
motive, hold up their hands ? (One hand reported to 
have been held up, behind the lecturer,) Very good: 
I see you are with me, and that you think I have not 
begun too near the ground. Now, without teasing 
you by putting farther question, I venture to assume 
that you will admit duty as at least a secondary or 
tertiary motive. You think that the desire of doing 
something useful, or obtaining some real good, is in- 
deed an existent collateral idea, though a secondary 
one, in most men^s desire of advancement. You will 
grant that moderately honest men desire place and 
office, at least in some measure, for the sake of bene- 
ficent power ; and would wish to associate rather with 
sensible and well-informed persons than with fools 
and ignorant persons, whether they are seen in the 
company of the sensible ones or not. And finally, 
without being troubled by repetition of any common 
truisms about the preciousness of friends, and the 
influence of companions, you will admit, doubtless, 
that according to the sincerity of our desire that our 
friends may be true, and' our companions wise, — and 
in proportion to the earnestness and discretion v/itli 
which we choose both, — will be the general chances 
of our happiness and usefulness. 

6. But granting that we had both the will and the 



SESAME AND LILIES 47 

sense to choose our friends well, how few of us have 
the power I or, at least, how limited, f ov most, is the 
sphere of choice! Nearly all our associations are 
determined by chance, or necessity; and restricted 
within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we 
would ; and those whom we know, we cannot have at 
our side when we most need them. All the higher 
circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, 
only momentarily and partially open. We may, by 
good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and 
hear the sound of his voice; or put a question to a 
man of science, and be answered good humoredly. We 
may intrude ten minutes^ talk on a cabinet minister, 
answered probably with words worse than silence, 
being deceptive ; or snatch, once or twice in our lives, 
the privilege of throwing a bouquet in the path of a 
princess, or arresting the kind glance of a queen. And 
yet these momentary chances we covet; and spend 
our years, and passions, and powers in pursuit of lit- 
tle more than these; while, meantime, there is a so- 
ciety, continually open to us, of people who will talk 
to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupa- 
tion ; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, 
and of the things nearest their hearts. And this so- 
ciety, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can 
be kept waiting round us all day long, — kings and 
statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, 
but to gain it ! — in those plainly furnished and nar- 
row anterooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no 
account of that company, — perhaps never listen to 
a word they would say, all day long ! 



48 SESAME AND LILIES 

7. You may tell me, perhaps, or think within your- 
selves; that the apathy with which we regard this 
company of the noble, who are praying us to listen to 
them; and the passion with which we pursue the 
company, probably of the ignoble, who despise us, or 
who have nothing to teach us, are grounded in this, 
— that we can see the faces of the living men, and 
it is themselves, and not their sayings, with which we 
desire to become familiar. But it is not so. Sup- 
pose you never were to see their faces : — suppose you 
could be put behind a screen in the statesman's 
cabinet, or the prince's chamber, would you not be 
glad to listen to their words, though you were forbid- 
den to advance beyond the screen? And when the 
screen is only a little less, folded in two instead of 
four, and you can be hidden behind the cover of the 
two boards that bind a book, and listen all day long, 
not to the casual talk, but to the studied, determined, 
chosen addresses of the wisest of men; — this station 
of audience, and honorable privy council, you despise ! 

8. But perhaps you will say that it is because the 
living people talk of things that are passing, and are 
of immediate interest to you, that you desire to hear 
them. Nay; that cannot be so, for the living people 
will themselves tell you about passing matters, much 
better in their writings than in their careless talk. 
But I admit that this motive does influence you, so 
far as you prefer those rapid and ephemeral writings 
to slow and enduring writings — books, properly so 
called. For all books are divisible into two classes : 
the books of the hour, and the books of all time. 



' SESAME AND LILIES 49 

Mark this distinction — it is not one of quality only. 
It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and 
the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. 
There are good books for the hour^, and good ones for 
all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for 
all time. I must define the two kinds before I go 
farther. 

9. The good book of the hour, then, — I do nol 
speak of the bad ones, — is simply the useful or plea- 
sant talk of some person whom you cannot otherwise 
converse with, printed for you. Very useful often, 
telling you what you need to know; very pleasant 
often, as a sensible friend's present talk would be. 
These bright accounts of travels ; good-humored and 
witty discussions of question; lively or pathetic^story- 
telling in the form of novel; firm fact-telling, by 
the real agents concerned in the events of passing his- 
tory; — all these books of the hour, multiplying 
among us as education becomes more general, are a 
peculiar possession of the present age: we ought to 
be entirely thankful for them, and entirely ashamed 
of ourselves if we make no goqd use of them. But 
we make the worst possible use if we allow them to 
usurp the place of true books : for, strictly speaking, 
they are not books at all, but merely letters or news- 
papers in good print. Our friend's letter may be 
delightful, or necessary, to-day : \yhether worth keep- 
ing or not, is to be considered. The newspaper may 
be entirely proper at breakfast-time, but assuredly it 
is not reading for all day. So, though bound up in a 
volume, the long letter which gives you so pleasant 



50 SESAME AND LILIES 



an account of the inns, and roads, and weather last 
year at such a place, or which tells yon that amusing 
story, or gives you the real circumstances of such and 
such events, however valuable fpr occasional refer- 
ence, may not be, in the real sense of the word, a 
^^ book ^^ at all, nor in the real sense, to be '' read." 
A book is essentially not a talked thing, but a written 
thing; and written not with a view of mere commu- 
nication, but of permanence. The book of talk is 
printed only because its author cannot speak to thou- 
sands of people at once : if he could, he would — the 
volume is mere nvultiplication of his voice. You can- 
not talk to your friend in India ; if you could, you 
would; you write instead: that is mere conveyance 
of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the 
voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate 
it. The author has something to say which he per- 
ceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. 
So far as he knows, no one has yet said it; so far 
as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound 
to say it, clearly and melodiously if he may ; clearly, 
at all events. In the sum of his life he finds this 
to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him ; 
— this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which 
his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to 
seize. He would fain set it down forever : engrave 
it on rock, if he could; saying, ^"^ This is the best of 
me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved 
and hated, like another ; my life was as the vapor, 
and is not; but this I saw and knew: this if any- 
thing of mine, is worth your memory.^^ That is his 






SESAME A^D LILIES 51 

" writing ; ^^ it is, in his small human way, and with 
whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his 
inscription, or scripture. That is a " Book/^ 

10. Perhaps you think no books were ever so writ- 
ten? 

But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in hon- 
esty, or at all in kindness? or do you think there is 
never any honesty or benevolence in wise people? 
None of us, I hope, are so unhappy as to think that. 
Well, whatever bit of a wise man's work is honestly 
and benevolently done, that bit is his book, or his 
piece of art. It is mixed always with evil fragments 
■ — ill-done, redundant, affected work. But if you 
read rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, 
and those are the book. 

11. Now, books of this kind have been written in 
all ages by their greatest men, — by great readers, 
great statesmen, and great thinkers. These are all 
at your choice ; and Life is short. You have heard as 
much before ; — yet, have you measured and mapped 
out this short life and its possibilities ? Do you know, 
if you read this, that you cannot read that — that 
what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow? 
Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or 
your stable-boy, when you: may talk with^queens and 
kings ; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy 
consciousness of your own claims to respect, that you 
jostle with the hungry and common crowd for entree 
here, and audience there, when all the while this eter- 
nal court is open to you, with its society, wide as the 
world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the 



52 SESAME AND LILIES 

mighty^ of every place and time ? Into that you may 
enter always; in that you may take fellowship and 
rank according to your wish ; from that, once entered 
into it, you can never be an outcast but by your own 
fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, 
your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, 
and the motives with which you strive to take high 
place in the society of the living, measured, as to all 
the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place 
you desire to take in this company of the Dead. 

12. " The place you desire," and the place you fit 
yourself for, I must also say; because, observe, this 
court of the past differs from all living aristocracy in 
this : — it is open to labor and to merit, but to noth- 
ing else. No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no 
artifice deceive, the guardian of those Elysian gates. 
In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar person ever enters 
there. At the portieres of that silent Faubourg St. 
Germain, there is but brief question : " Do you de- 
serve to enter? Pass. Co you ask to be the com- 
panion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you 
shall be. Do you long for the conversation of the 
wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear 
it. But on other terms ? — no. If you will not rise 
to us, we cannot stoop to you. The living lord may 
assume courtesy, the living philosopher explain his 
thought to you with considerate pain ; but here we 
neither feign nor interpret ; you must rise to the level 
of our thoughts if you would be gladdened bv them, 
and share our feelings if you would recognize our 
nre^ence.'- •• 



SESAME AND LILIES 53 

13. This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit 
that it is much. You must, in a word, love these 
people, if you are to be among them. No ambition is 
of any use. They scorn your ambition. You must 
love them, and show your love in these two following 
ways. 

I. — First, by a true desire to be taught by them, 
and to enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, 
observe; not to find your own expressed by them. 
If the person who wrote the book is not wiser than 
you, you need not read it ; if he be, he will think dif- 
ferently from you in many respects. 

Very ready we are to say of a book, ^^ How good 
this is — that's exactly what I think!'' But the 
right feeling is, '' How strange that is ! I never 
thought of that before, and yet I see it is true ; or if 
I do not now, I hope I shall, some day." But whether 
thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go 
to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. 
Judge it afterwards if you think yourself qualified to 
do so; but ascertain it first. And be sure also, if 
the author is worth anything, that you will not get at 
his meaning all at once; — nay, that at his whole 
meaning you will not for a long time arrive in any 
wise. Not that he does not say what he means, and 
in strong words too; but he cannot say it all; and 
what is more strange, will not, but in a hidden way 
and in parable, in order that he may be sure you 
want it. I cannot quite see the reason of this, nor 
analyze that cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men 



54 SESAME AND LILIES 

which makes them always hide their deeper thought.^ 
They do not give it you by way of help, but ot re- 
ward ; and will make themselves sure that you deserve 
it before they allow you to reach it. But it is the 
same with the physical type of wisdom, gold. There 
seems, to you and me, no reason why the electric 
forces of the earth should not carry whatever there is 
of gold within it at once to the mountain tops, so that 
kings and people might know that all the gold they 
could get was there ; and without any trouble of dig- 
ging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it 
away, and coin as much as they needed. But Nature 
does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures 
in the earth, nobody knows where ; you may dig long 
and find none ; you must dig painfully to find any. 

14. And it is just the same with men's best wis- 
dom. When you come to a good book, you must ask 
yourself, "Am I inclined to work as an Australian 
miner would ? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good 
order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well 
up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my tem- 
per ?'' And, keeping the figure a little longer, even 
at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful 
one, the metal you are in search of being the author's 
mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which 
you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. 
And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learn- 
ing; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful 
soul. Do not hope to get at any good author^s mean- 



^ See Matthew xiii. 10-13. 



SESAME AND LILIES 55 

ing without those tools and that fire ; often you wili 
heed sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientest fusing, 
before you can gather one grain of the metal. 

15. And, therefore, first of all, I tell you earnestlj 
and authoritatively (I Icnow I am right in this), you 
must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, 
and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by 
syllable — nay, letter by letter. For though it is only 
by reason of the opposition of letters in the function 
of signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the 
study of books is called '^ literature,^' and that a man 
versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a 
man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, 
you may yet connect with that accidental nomencla- 
ture this real fact, - — that you might read all the 
books in the British Museum (if you could live long 
enough), and remain an -utterly ^^ illiterate,^' unedu- 
cated person; but that if you read ten pages of a 
good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real 
accuracy, — - you are f orevermore in some measure 
an educated person. The entire difference between 
education and non-education (as regards the merely 
intellectual part of it) consists in this accuracy. A 
well-educated gentleman may not know many lan- 
guages, — may not be able to speak any but his own, 
— may have read very few books. But whatever 
language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever 
word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above 
all, he is learned in the peerage of words ; knows the 
words of true descent and ancient blood, at a glance, 
from words of modern canaille; remembers all their 



56 SESAME AND LILIES 

ancestry, their intermarriages, distant relationships^ 
and the extent to which thev were admitted, and 
oflBces they held, among the national noblesse of 
words at any time, and in any country. Bnt an un- 
educated person may know, by memory, many lan- 
,guages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not a 
word of any, — not a word even of his own. An 
ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to 
make his way ashore at most ports ; yet he has only 
to speak a sentence of any language to be known for 
an illiterate person; so also the accent, or turn of 
expression of a single sentence, will at once mark a 
scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclusively 
admitted, by educated persons, that a false accent or 
a mistaken syllable is enough, in the parliament of 
any civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain 
degree of inferior standing forever. 

16. And this is right ; but it is a pity that the ac- 
curacy insisted on is not greater, and required to a 
serious purpose. It is right that a false Latin quan- 
tity should excite a smile in the House of Commons ; 
but it is wrong that a false English meaning should 
not excite a frown there. Let the accent of words be 
watched, and closely; let their meaning be watched 
more closely still, and fewer will do the work. A few 
words, well chosen and distinguished, will do work 
that a thousand cannot, when every one is acting, 
equivocally, in the function of another. Yes; and 
words, if they are not watched, will do deadly work 
sometimes. There are masked words droning and 
skulking about us in Europe just now — (there never 



SESAME AND LILIES 57 

were so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, 
blotching, blundering, infectious " information/^ or 
rather deformation, everywhere, and to the teaching of 
catechisms and phrases at schools instead of human 
meanings) — there are masked words abroad, I say, 
which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, 
and most people will also fight for, live for, or even 
die for, fancying they mean this or that, or the other, 
of things dear to them : for such words wear chame- 
leon cloaks — '' ground-lion ^^ cloaks, of the^ color of 
the ground of any man^s fancy : on that ground they 
lie in wait, and rend him with a spring from it. There 
never were creatures of prey so mischievous, never 
diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as 
these masked words ; they are the unjust stewards of 
all men^s ideas : whatever fancy or favorite instinct a 
man most cherishes, he gives to his favorite masked 
word to take care of for him ; the word at last comes 
to have an infinite power over him, — you cannot get 
at him but by its ministry. 

17. And in languages so mongrel in breed as the 
English, there is a fatal power of equivocation put 
into men^s hands, almost whether they will or no, in 
being able to use Greek or Latin words for an idea 
when they want it to be awful ; and Saxon or other- 
wise common words when they want it to be vulgar. 
What a singular and salutary effect, for instance, 
would be produced on the minds of people who are in 
the habit of taking the Form of the " Word '' they 
live by, for the Power of which that Word tells them, 
if we always either retained', or refused, the Greek 



58 SESAME AND LILIES 

form " bibles/^ or ^' biblion," as the right expression 
for ^^ book '^ — instead of employing it only in the 
one instance in which we wish to give dignity to the 
idea, and translating it into English everywhere else. * 
How wholesome it would be for many simple persons 
if, in such places (for instance) as Acts xix. 19, we 
retained the Greek expression, instead of translating 
it, and they had to read — " Many of them also which 
nsed curious arts, brought their bibles together, and 
burnt them before all men; and they counted the 
price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of 
silver ^^ I Or if, on the other hand, we translated 
where we retain it, and always spoke of " the Holy 
Book,^^ instead of " Holy Bible,^^ it might come into 
more heads than it does at present, that the Word of 
God, by which the heavens were, of old, and by which 
they are now kept in store,^ cannot be made a present 
of to anybody in morocco binding, *nor sown on any 
wayside by help either of steam plough or steam 
press; but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, 
and by us with contumely refused; and sown in us 
daily, and by us, as instantly as may be, choked. 

18. So, again, consider what effect has been pro- 
duced on the English vulgar mind by the use of the 
sonorous Latin form '' damno,^^ in translating the 
Greek KaraKpLvo), when people charitably wish to 
make it forcible; and the substitution of the tem- 
perate " condemn ^^ for it, when they choose to' keep 
it gentle; and what notable sermons have been 

^ 2 Peter iii. 5-7. 



SESAME AND LILIES 59 

preached by illiterate clergymen on — " He that be- 
lieveth not shall be damned;'' though they would 
shrink with horror from translating Heb. xi. 7, " The 
saving of his house^ by which he damned the world/' 
or John viii. 10-11, " Woman, hath no man damned 
thee? She saith, ISTo man, Lord. Jesus answered 
her, Neither do I damn thee : go, and sin no more." 
And divisions in the mind of Europe, which have 
cost seas of blood, and in the defence of which the 
noblest souls of men have been cast away in frantic 
desolation, countless as forest leaves, — though, in 
the heart of them, founded on deeper causes, — have 
nevertheless been rendered practically possible, 
mainly, by the European adoption of the Greek word 
for a public meeting, " ecclesia," to give peculiar re- 
spectability to such meetings, when held for religious 
purposes; and other collateral equivocations, such as 
the vulgar English one of using the word " priest " 
as a contraction for " presbyter." 

19. Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this 
is the habit you must form. Nearly every word in 
your language has been first a word of some other 
language — of Saxon, German, French, Latin, or 
Greek (not to speak of Eastern and primitive dia- 
lects). And many words have been all these; — that 
is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, French or 
German next, and English last: undergoing a certain 
change of sense and use on the lips of each nation: 
but retaining a deep vital meaning, which, all good 
scholars feel in employing them, even at this day. If 
you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn it ; young 



so SESAME AND LILIES 

or old — girl or boy — whoever you may be, if you 
think of reading seriously (which, if course, implies 
that you have some leisure at command), learn your 
Greek alphabet; then get good dictionaries of all 
these languages, and whenever you are in doubt about 
a word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max M'iiller's 
lectures, thoroughly, to begin with; and, after that, 
never let a word escape you that looks suspicious. It 
is severe work; but you will find it, even at first, inter- 
esting, and at last, endlessly amusing. Arid the gen- 
eral gain to your character, in power and precision, 
will be quite incalculable. 

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to 
know, Greek, or Latin, or French. It takes a whole 
life to learn any language perfectly. But you can 
easily ascertain the meanings through which the 
English word has passed ; and those which in a good 
writer^s work it must still bear. 

20. And now, merely for example^s sake, I will, 
with your permission, read a few lines of a true book 
with you carefully ; and see what will i:ome out of " 
them. I will take a book perfectly known to you all. 
No English words are more familiar to us, yet few 
perhaps have been read with less sincerity. I will 
take these few following lines of Lycidas. 

''Last came, and last did go, 

The Pilot of the Galilean lake. 

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain 

(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain). 

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake: — 

'liow well could I have spared for thee, young swain 

Enow of such as, for their bellies' sake, 



SESAME AND LILIES 61 

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold! 

Of other care they little reckoning make 

Than how to scranible at the shearers ' feast. 

And shove away the worthy bidden guest. 

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold 

A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least 

That to the faithful Herdman^s art belongs! 

What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; 

And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; 

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 

But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, 

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; 

Besides what the grim Wolf with privy paw 

Daily devours apace, and nothing said. ' ' ' 

Let us think over this passage^ and examine its words. 

First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to 
St. Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but 
the very types of it which Protestants usually refuse 
most passionately ? His " mitred ^' locks ! Milton 
was no bishop-lover; how comes St. Peter to be 
" mitred ^^ ? " Two massy keys he bore.^' Is this, 
then, the power of the keys claimed by the Bishops 
of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Milton only 
in a poetical license, for the sake of its picturesque- 
ness, that he may get the gleam of the golden keys to 
help his effect ? 

'Do not think it. Great men do not play stage 
tricks with the doctrines of life and death : only little 
men do that. Milton means what he says; and 
means it with his might too — is going to put the 
whole strength of his spirit presently into the saying 
of it. For though not a lover of false bishops, he 



62 SESAME AND LILIES 

was a lover of true ones ; and the Lake-pilot is here, 
in his thoughts^ the type and head of true episcopal 
power. • For Milton reads that text^ " I will give nnto 
thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven/^ quite hon- 
estly. Puritan though he be, he would not blot it out ^ 
of the book because there have been bad bishops; 
nay, in order to understand him, we must understand 
that verse first; it will not do to eye it askance, or 
whisper it under our breath, as if it were a weapon of 
an adverse sect. It is a solemn, universal assertion, 
deeply to be kept in mind by all sects. But perhaps 
we shall be better able to reason on it if we go on a 
little farther, and come back to it. For clearly this 
marked insistence on the power of the true episcopate 
is to make lis feel more weightily what is to be 
charged against the false claimants of episcopate; or 
generally, against false claimants of power and rank 
in the body of the clergy : they who, " for their bel- 
lies^ sake, creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold/^ 
21. Never think Milton uses those three words to 
fill up his verse, as a loose writer would. He needs 
all the three ; — specially those three, and no more 
than those — " creep/' and " intrude,^' and " climb ; '^ 
no other words would or could serve the turn, and 
no more could be added. For they exhaustively com- 
prehend the three classes, correspondent to the three 
characters, of men who dishonestly seek ecclesiastical 
power. First, those who " creep '^ into the fold ; who 
do not care for office, nor name, but for secret in- 
fluence, and do all things occultly and cunningly, con- 
senting to any servility of office or conduct, so only 



SESAME AND LILIES 63 

that they may intimately discern, and unawares 
direct, the minds of men. Then those who " intrude ^^ 
(thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who by 
natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence of 
tongue, and fearlessly perseverant self-assertion, ob- 
tain hearing and authority with the common crowd. 
Lastly, those who " climb,^^ who, by labor and learn- 
ing, both stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in the 
cause of their own ambition, gain high dignities and 
authorities, and become " lords over the heritage,^^ 
though not " ensamples to the flock.^^ 
22. Now go on : — 

''Of other care they little reckoning make, 
Than how to scramble at the shearers ' feast. 
Blind mouths ' ' — 

I pause again, for this is a strange expression: a 
broken metaphor, one might think, careless and un- 
scholarly. 

N'ot so; its very audacity and pithiness are in- 
tended to make us look close at the phrase and remem- 
ber it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely 
accurate contraries of right character, in the two great 
offices of the Church — those of bishop and pastor. 

A " Bishop ^' means '' a person who sees.^' 

A " Pastor ^^ means " a person who feeds." 

The most unbishoply character a man can have is 
therefore to be Blind. 

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want 
to be fed, — to be a Mouth. 

Take the two reverses together, and you have 



64 SESAME AND LILIES 

" blind mouths.'^ We may advisably follow out this 
idea a little. Nearly all the evils in the Church have 
arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. 
They want authority, not outlook. Whereas their real 
ofRce is not to rule; though it may be vigorously to 
exhort and rebuke ; it is the king's office to rule ; the 
bishop's office is to oversee the flock; to number it, 
sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full ac- 
count of it. Xow, it is clear he cannot give account 
of the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the 
bodies of his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a 
bishop has to do is at least to put himself in a posi- 
tion in w^hich, at any moment, he can obtain "the his- 
tory, from childhood, of every liviijg soul in his 
diocese, and of its present state. Down in that back 
street Bill and Xancy, knocking each other's teeth 
out ! — Does the bishop know all about it ? Has he 
his eye upon them ? Has he Tiad his eye upon them ? 
Can he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got 
into the habit of beating N'ancy about the head ? If 
he cannot, he is no bishop, though he had a mitre as 
high as Salisbury steeple ; he is no bishop, — he has 
sought to be at the helm instead of the mast-head; he 
has no sight of things. '' Nay,'' you say, " it is not 
his duty to look after Bill in the back street.^^ What ! 
the fat sheep that have full fleeces — you think it is 
only those he should look after, while (go back to 
your Milton) " the hungry sheep look up, and are not 
fed, besides what the grim Wolf, with privy paw" 
(bishops knowing nothing about it), "daily devours 
apace, and nothing said " ? 



J 



SESAME AND LILIES 65 

"But that's not our idea of a bishop."^ Perhaps 
not ; but it was St. PauFs ; and it was Milton's. They 
may be right, or we may be; but we must not think 
we are reading either one or the other by putting our 
meaning into their words. 

23. I go on. 
' * But swoln with wind s-nd the rank mist^they draw. ' ' 

This is to meet the vulgar answer that '' if the poor 
are not, looked after in their bodies, they are in their 
souls ; they have spiritual food.'' 

And Milton says, " They have no such thing as 
spiritual food ; they are only swollen with wind." At 
first you may think that is a coarse type, and an ob- 
scure one. But again, it is a quite literally accurate 
one. Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and 
find out the meaning of " Spirit." It is only a con- 
traction of the Latin word " breath," and an indis- 
tinct translation of the Greek word for "^ wind." The 
same word is used in writing, " The wind bloweth 
where it listeth ; " and in writing, " So is every one 
that is born of the Spirit;" born of the hreath, that 
is ; for it means the breath of God, in soul and body. 
We have the true sense of it in our words " inspira- 
tion " and ^^ expire." Now, there are two kinds of 
breath with which the flock may be filled; God's 
breath and man's. The breath of God is health, and 
life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the 
flocks on the hills; but man's breath — the word 
which he calls spiritual — is disease and contagion to 

* Compare the 13th Letter in Time and Tide. 



66 SESAME AND LILIES 

them^ as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with 
it; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body by the 
vapors of its own decomposition. This is literally 
true of all false religious teaching; the first, and 
last, and f atalest sign of it is that " puffing up.^^ Your 
converted children, who teach their parents; your 
converted convicts, who teach honest men; your con- 
verted dunces, who, having lived in cretinous stupefac- 
tion half their lives, suddenly awaking to the fact of 
there being a God, fancy themselves therefore his 
peculiar people and messengers; your sectarians of 
every species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, 
of high church or low, in so far as they think them- 
selves exclusively in the right and others wrong ; and 
preeminently, in every sect, those who hold that men 
can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing 
rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of 
work ; — these are the true fog children — clouds, 
these, without water; bodies, these, of putrescent 
vapor and skin, without blood or flesh: blown bag- 
pipes for the fiends to pipe with — corrupt, and cor- 
rupting — " Swoln with wind and the rank mist they 
draw.^^ 

24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the 
power of the keys, for now we can understand them. 
Note the difference between Milton and Dante in their 
interpretation of this power; for once, the latter is 
vreaker in thought; he supposes hoth the keys to be 
of the gate of heaven; one is of gold, the other of 
silver : they are given by St. Peter to the sentinel 
angel; and it is not easy to determine the meaning 



I 



SESAME AND LILIES • 67 

either of the substances of the three steps of the gate, 
or of the two keys. But Milton makes one^ of gold, 
the key of heaven ; the other, of iron, the key of the 
prison in which the wicked teachers are to be bound 
who "have taken away the key of knowledge, yet 
entered not in themselves/^ 

We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor 
are to see, and feed ; and of all who do so it is said, 
" He that watereth, shall be watered also himself/^ 
But the reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, 
shall be withered himself; and he that seeth not, shall 
himself be shut out of sight — shut into the perpetual 
prison-house. And that prison opens here, as well 
as hereafter; he who is to be bound in heaven must 
first be bound on earth. That command to the strong 
angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, " Take 
him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out/' 
issues, in its measure, against the teacher, for every 
help withheld, and for every truth refused, and for 
every falsehood enforced ; so that he /is more strictly 
fettered the more he fetters, and farther outcast, as 
he more and more misleads, till at last the bars of the 
iron cage close upon him, and as " the golden opes, 
the iron shuts amain.'' 

25. We have got something out of the lines, I 
think, and much more is yet to be found in them ; but 
we have done enough by way of example of the kind 
of word-by-word examination of your author which 
is rightly called " reading ; " watching every accent 
and expression, and putting ourselves always in the 
author's place, annihilating our own personality, and 



68 . SESAME AND LILIES 

seeking to enter into his^ so as to be able assuredly to 
say, '' Thus Milton thought/' not " Thus / thought, 
in mis-reading Milton/' And by this process you will 
gradually come to attach less weight to your own 
"Thus I thought'' at other times. You will begin to 
perceive that what you thought was a matter of no 
serious importance; that your thoughts on any sub- 
ject are not perhaps the clearest and wisest that could 
be arrived at thereupon : in fact, that unless you are 
a very singular person, you cannot be said to have any 
"thoughts" at all; that you have no materials for 
them, in any serious matters;^ — no right to "think," 
but only to try to learn more of the facts. Nay, most 
probably all your life (unless, as I said, you are a 
singular person) you will have no legitimate right to 
an "opinion" on any business, except that instantly 
under your. hand. What must of necessity be done, 
you can always find out, beyond question, how to do. 
Have you a house to keep in order, a commodity to 
sell, a field to plough, a ditch to cleanse ? There need 
be no two opinions about these proceedings; it is at 
your peril if you have not much more than an "opin- 
ion" on the way to manage such matters. And also, 
outside of your own business, there are one or two 
subjects on which you are bound to have but one 
opinion. That roguery and lying are objectionable, 
and are instantly to be flogged out of the way when- 

^ Modern * * education ' ^ for the most part signifies giving 
people the faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable 
3ubject of importance to them. 



SESAME AND LILIES 69 

ever discovered; that eovetousness and love of 
quarreling are dangerous dispositions even in chil- 
dren^ and deadly dispositions in men and nations; 
that in the end^, the God of heaven and earth loves 
active, modest, and kind people, and hates idle, proud, 
greedy, and cruel ones; — on these general facts you 
are bound to have but one and that a very strong 
opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, govern- 
ments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole, 
you can know nothing, — judge nothing; that the 
best you can do, e\'en though you may be a well- 
educated person, is to be silent, and strive to be 
wiser every day, and to understand a little more of 
the thoughts of others, which so soon as you try to do 
honestly, you will discover that the thoughts even of 
the wisest are very little more than pertinent ques- 
tions. To put the difficulty into a clear shape, and 
exhibit to you the grounds for indecision, that is all 
they can generally do for you ! — and well for them 
and for us, if indeed they are able "to mix the music 
with our thoughts, and sadden us with heavenly 
doubts.^^ This writer, from whom I have been read- 
ing to you, is not among the first or wisest : he sees 
shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it is easy to 
find out his full meaning; but with the greater men, 
you cannot fathom their meaning; they do not even 
wholly measure it themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose 
I had asked you, for instance, to seek for Shakes- 
peare's opinion, instead of Milton's, on this matter of 
Church authority? — or for Dante's? Have any of you, 
at this instant, the least idea what either thought 



70 SESAME AND LILIES 



about it? Have you ever balanced the scene with 
the bishops in Eichard III. against the character 
of Cranmer? the description of St. Francis and St. 
Dominic against that of him who made Virgil wonder 
to gaze upon him^ — "disteso, tanto vilmente^ nelV 
eterno esilio;'^ or of him whom Dante stood beside, 
^^come'l frate che confessa lo perfido assassin'^? 
Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men better than 
most of us, I presume ! They were both in the midst 
of the main struggle between the temporal and spirit- 
ual powers. They had an opinion, we may guess. 
But where is it ? Bring it into court ! Put Shake- 
speare's or Dante's creed into articles, and send it up 
for trial by the Ecclesiastical Courts I 

26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for many 
and many a day, to come at the real purposes and 
teaching of these great men; but a very little honest 
study of them will enable you to perceive that what 
you took for your own ^^judgment'^ was mere chance 
prejudice, and drifted, helpless, entangled weed of 
castaway thought ; nay, you will see that most men^s 
minds are indeed little better than rough heath wil- 
derness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, partly 
overgrown with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind- 
sown herbage of evil surmise; that the first thing you 
have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and 
scornfully to set fire to this; burn all the jungle into 
wholesome ash-heaps, and then plough and sow. All 
the true literary work before you. for life, must begin 
with obedience to that order, ^^'Break up your fallow 
ground, and sow not among thorns/' 



n 



I 



SESAME AND LILIES VI 

27. II. Having then faithfully listened to the 
great teachers^ that you may enter into their 
Thoughts, you have yet this higher advance to make ; 
- — you have to enter into their Hearts. As you go to 
them first for clear sight, so you must stay with them, 
that you may share at last their just and mighty Pas- 
sion. Passion, or ^"^sensation.^^ I am not afraid of 
the word; still less of the thing. You have heard 
many outcries against sensation lately ; but, I can tell 
you, it is not less sensation we want, but more. The 
ennobling difference between one man and another — 
between one animal and another — is precisely in this, 
that one feels more than another. If we were sponges, 
perhaps sensation might not be easily got for us; if 
we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut 
in two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation 
might not be good for us. But being human crea- 
tures, it is good for us ; nay, we are only human in so 
far as we are sensitive, and our honor is precisely in 
proportion to our passion. 

28. You know I said of that great and pure so- 
ciety of the Dead, that it would allow "no vain or vul- 
gar person to enter there.^^ What do you think I 
meant by a "vulgar^^ person ? What do you yourselves 
mean by "vulgarity'^ ? You will find it a fruitful sub- 
ject of thought; but, briefly, the essence of all vul- 
garity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent 
vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped 
bluntness of body and mind ; but in true inbred vul- 
garity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in ex- 
tremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit 



78 SESAME AND LILIES 



and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without 
horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and 
the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened 
conscience, that men become Tulgar; they are forerer 
vulgar, predsely in proportion as they are incapable 
of sympathy — of quick understanding,— of all that, 
in deep insistence on the common but most accurate 
term, may be called the "tact,'' or "touch-faculty,'' 
body and soul: that tact which the Mimosa has 
trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures 
finene^ and fulness of sensation, beyond reason; 
guide and sanctifier of reason itsdf. Beason can 
but determine what is true: — it is the God-given 
passion of humanity which alone can recognize what 
God has made good. 

29. We come then to that great concourse of the 
Dead, not merely to know from them what is true, 
but chiefly to fed with them what is jusL Xow, to 
feel with them, we must be like them; and none of us 
can become that wiiSiout pains. As the true knowl- 
edge is disciplined and tested knowledge, — not the 
first thought that comes, — so the true passion is dis- 
ciplined and tested passion, — not the first pa^on 
that comes. The first that come are the vain, the 
false, the treacherous; if you yield to them, they will 
lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow en- 
thusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true 
passion lefL Xot that any feeling po^ble to hu- 
manity is in itself wrong, but only wrong wheu un- 
disciplined. Its nobility is in its force and justice; it 
is wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. 



4 





SESAME AND LILIES 73 

There is a mean wonder^ as of a child who sees a 
juggler tossing golden balls, and this is base, if you 
will. But do you think that the wonder is ignoble, or 
the sensation less, with which every human soul is 
called to watch the golden balls of heaven tossed 
through the night by the Hand that made them? 
There is a mean curiosity, as of a child opening a 
forbidden door, or a servant prying into her master^s 
business; — and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the 
front of danger, the source of the great river beyond 
the sand, — the place of the great continent beyond 
the sea; — a nobler curiosity still, which questions of 
the source of the Eiver of Life, and of the space of 
the Continent of Heaven — things which ^^the angels 
desire to look into/^ So the anxiety is ignoble, with 
which you linger over the course and catastrophe of 
an idle tale ; but do you think the anxiety is less, or 
greater, with which you watch, or ought to watch, the 
dealings of fate and destiny with the life of an agon- 
ized nation? Alas! it is the narrowness, selfishness, 
minuteness, of your sensation that you have to de- 
plore in England at this day; — sensation which 
' spends itself in bouquets and speeches ; in revellings 
and junketings ; in sham fights and gay puppet shows, 
while you can look on and see noble nations mur- 
dered, man by man, without an effort or a tear. 

30. I said "minuteness'^ and "selfishness" of sen- 
sation, but it would have been enough to have said 
"injustice'^ or "unrighteousness^^ of sensation. For 
as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned 
from a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle nation 



74 SESAME AND LILIES l^l 

(such nations have been) better to be discerned from 
a mob, than in this, — that their feelings are constant 
and just, results of due contemplation, and of equal 
thought. You can talk a mob into anything ; its feel- 
ings may be — usually are — on the whole, generous 
and right ; but it has no foundation for them, no hold 
of them ; you may tease or tickle it into any, at your 
pleasure; it thinks by infection, for the most part, 
catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing 
so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when 
the fit is on; — nothing so great but it will forget in 
an hour, when the fit is past. But a gentleman's, or 
a gentle nation's, passions are just, measured, and 
continuous. A great nation, for instance, does not 
spend its entire national wits for a couple of months 
in weighing evidence of a single ruffian's having done 
a single murder; and for a couple of years see its 
own children murder each other by their thousands 
or tens of thousands a day, considering only what 
the effect is likely to be' on the price of cotton, and 
caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in 
the wrong. Xeither does a great nation send its poor 
little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts; and allow 
its bankrupts to steal their hundreds or thousands 
with a bow, and its bankers rich with poor men's 
savings, to close their doors "^'under circumstances 
over which they have no control," with a ^^by your 
leave;" and large landed estates to be bought by 
men who have made their money by going with armed 
steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium 
at the cannon's mouth, and altering, for the benefit 



I 



SESAME AND LILIES 75 

of the foreign nation, the common highwayman's 
demand of "your money or your life/' into that of 
^^your money and yonr life/' Neither does a great 
nation allow the lives of its innocent poor to be 
parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of 
them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a 
life extra per week to its landlords.;^ and then de- 
bate, with drivelling tears, and diabolical sympathies, 
whether it ought not piously to save, and nursingly 
cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great 
nation, having made up its mind that hanging is 
quite the wholesomest process for its homicides in 
general, can yet with mercy distinguish between the 
degrees of guilt in homicides ; and does not yelp like 
a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-track 
of an unhappy crazed boy, or gray-haired clodpate 
Othello, "perplexed i' the extreme," at the very mo- 
ment that it is sending a Minister of the Crown to 
make polite speeches to a man who is bayoneting 
young girls in their fathers' sight, and killing noble 
youths in cool blood, faster than a country butcher 
kills lambs' in spring. And, lastly, a great nation 
does not mock Heaven and its Powers, by pretending 
belief in a revelation which asserts the love of money 
to be the root of all evil, and declaring, at the same 
time, fhat it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, • 
in all chief national deeds and measures, by no other 
love. 

^ See note at end of lecture. I have put it in large type, 
because the course of matter's since it was written has made 
It perhaps better worth attention. 



76 SESAME AND LILIES 



I 



31. My friends, I do not know why any of us 
should talk about reading. We want some sharper 
discipline than that of reading ; but at all events, be 
assured, we cannot read. No reading is possible for 
a people with its mind in this state. No sentence 
of any great writer is intelligible to them. It is 
simply and sternly impossible for the English public, 
at this moment, to understand any thoughtful writ- 
ing, — so incapable of thought has it become in its 
insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, 
little worse than this incapacity of thought; it is not 
corruption of the inner nature; we ring true still, 
when anything strikes home to us; and though the 
idea that everything should "pay^^ has infected our 
every purpose so deeply, that even when we would 
play the good Samaritan, we never take out our two- 
pence and give them to the host without saying, 
"When I come again, thou shalt give me fourpence,^' 
there is a capacity of noble passion left in our hearts' 
core. We show it in our work — in our war — even 
in those unjust domestic affections which make us 
furious at a small private wrong, while we are polite 
to a boundless public one : we are still industrious to 
the last hour of the day, though we add the gambler's 
fury to the laborer's patience; we are still brave to 
the death, though incapable of discerning true cause 
for battle; and are still true in affection to our own 
flesh, to the death, as the sea-monsters are, and the 
rock-eagles. And there is hope for a nation while 
this can be still said of it. As long as' it holds its 
life in its hand, ready to give it for its honor (though 



J 



SESAME AND LILIES Hf 

a foolish honor), for its love (though a selfish love), 
and for its business (though a base business), there is 
hope for it. But hope only ; for this instinctive, reck- 
less virtue cannot last. No nation can last, which has 
made a mob of itself, however generous at heart. It 
must discipline its passions, and direct them, or they 
will discipline it, one day, with scorpion-whips. Above 
all, a nation cannot last as a iTiOney-making mob: it 
cannot with impunity — it cannot with existence — 
go on despising literature, despising science, despising 
art, despising nature, despising compassion, and con- 
centrating its soul on Pence. Do you think these are 
harsh or wild words? Have patience with me but a 
little longer. J will prove their truth to you, clause 
by clause. 

32. I. I say first we have despised literature. 
What do we, as a nation, care about books? How 
much do you think we spend altogether on our li- 
braries, public or private, as compared with what we 
spend on our horses? If a man spends lavishly on his 
library, you call him mad — a bibliomaniac. But you 
never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin 
themselves every day by their horses, and you do not 
hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, 
to go lower still, how much do you think the contents 
of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public 
and private, would fetch, as compared with the con- 
tents of its wine-cellars ? What position would its ex- 
penditure on literature take, as compared with its ex- 
penditure on luxurious eating? We talk of food for 
the mind, as of food for the body : now a good book 



78 SESAME AXD LILIES 



I 



contains such food inexhanstiblY; it is a provision for 
Kfe, and for the best part of ns; yet how long nKwt^j 
people would look at the best book before thej would'^H 
give the price of a large turbot for it ! Though there ^ 
have been men who have pinched their stomachs and 
bared their backs to bi]^ a book, who^ libraries were 
cheaper to them, I think, in the «id, than most men's 
dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and 
more the pitv; for, indeed, a precious thing is all the 
more precious to us if it has been won by work or 
economy; and if public libraii^ were half as costly 
as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what 
bracelets do, even foolish men and women might 
sometimes sustt:: tI re vas good in reading, as well 
as in mn-i ^ - ^1 sparkling; whereas the very 
deapness : ^ :~ ~ hing even wise people for- 

get that a - 1 : iing, it is worth buying. 

Mo book is worth anything which is not worth much; 
nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re- 
read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, m that 
you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a sol- 
dier can seize the weapon he needs in an armory, or a 
housewife bring the spice she needs from her store- 
Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as 
honey, if we would eat it, in a good book; and tiie 
family must be poor indeed which, once in their Uves, 
cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their 
baker's bilL We call ourselves a ridi nation, and 
we are filthy and f ooUsh enough to thumb each other's 
books out of circulating libraries ! 

33. II. I say we have despised science. ^'What F* 



SESAME AND LILIES 79 

yon exclaim, ''are we not foremos^ in all discovery,^ 
and is not the whole world giddy by reason, or un- 
reason, of our inventions ?" Yes, but do you suppose 
that is national work ? That work is all done in spite 
of the nation; by private people's zeal and money. 
We are glad enough, indeed, to make our profit of 
science; we snap up anything in the way of a scientific 
bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough ; but if the 
scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to us, that 
is another story. What have we publicly done for 
science? We are obliged to know what o'clock it is, 
for the safety of our ships, and therefore we pay for 
an Observatory ; and we allow ourselves, in the person 
of our Parliament, to be annually tormented into do- 
ing something, in a slovenly way, for the British Mu- 
seum; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for 
keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. If 
anybody will pay for their own telescope, and resolve 
another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if 
it were our own ; if one in ten thousand of our hunt- 
ing squires suddenly perceives that the earth was in- 
deed made to be something else than a portion for 
foxes, and burrows in it himself, and tells us where 
the gold is, and where the coals, we understand that 
there is some use in that; and very properly knight 
him : but is the accident of his having found out how 
to employ himself usefully any credit to ns? (The 

^ Since this was written, the answer has become definitely 
— No; we having surrendered the field of Arctic discovery 
to the Continental nations, as being ourselves too poor to pay 
for ships. 



80 SESAME AND LILIES 

negation of such discovery among his brother squires 
may perhaps be some discredit to us, if we would con- 
sider of it.) But if you doubt these generalities, here 
is one fact for us all to meditate upon, illustrative of 
our love of science. Two years ago there was a collec- 
tion of the fossils of Solenhof en to be sgld in Bavaria : 
the best in existence, containing many specimens 
unique for perf ectness, and one, unique as an example 
of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living 
creatures being announced by that fossil.) This col- 
lection, of which the mere market worth, among pri- 
vate buyers, would probably have been some thousand 
or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the English 
nation for seven hundred: but we would not give 
seven hundred, and the whole series would have been 
in the Munich museum at this moment, if Professor 
Owen^ had not, with loss of his own time, and patient 
tormenting of the British public in person of its rep- 
resentatives, got leave to give four hundred pounds at 
once, and himself become answerable for the other 
three! which the said public will doubtless pay him 
eventually, but sulkily, and caring nothing about the 
matter all the while; only always ready to cackle if 
any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg of you, arith- 
metically, what this fact means. Your annual ex- 
penditure for public purposes (a third of it for mili- 

^ I state this fact without Professor Owen 's permission, 
which of course he could not with propriety have granted, 
had I asked it; but I considered it so important that the 
pubUc should be aware of the fact, that I do what seems to 
me right, though rude. 



SESAME AND LILIES 81 

tary apparatus) is at least fifty millions. Now £700 
is to £50,000,000, roughly, as seven-pence to two thou- 
sand pounds. Suppose, then, a gentleman of un- 
known income, but whose wealth was to be conjec- 
tured from the fact that he spent two thousand a 
year on his park walls and footmen only, professes 
himself fond of science ; and that one of his servants 
comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection of 
fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be 
had for the sum of seven-pence sterling ; and that the 
gentleman, who is fond of science, and spends two 
thousand a year on his park, answers, after keeping 
his servant waiting several months, "Well ! 1^11 give 
you four-pence for them, if you will be answerable for 
the extra three-pence yourself, till next year V^ 

34. III. I say you have despised Art ! "What V 
you again answer, "have we not Art exhibitions, miles 
long ? and do not we pay thousands of pounds for sin- 
gle pictures ? and have we not Art schools and insti- 
tutions, more than ever nation had before?'^ Yes, 
truly, but all that is for the sake of the shop. You 
would fain sell canvas as well as coals, and crockery 
as well as iron; you would take every other nation's 
bread out of its mouth if you could ;^ not being able 
to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thor- 
oughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, 
screaming to every passer-by, "What d'ye lack ?" You 

^That was our real idea of ''Free Trade ' ^—* ' AH the 
trade to myself. ^ * You find now that by ' ' competition ' * 
other people can manage to sell something as well as you — 
and now we call for Protection again. Wretches! 



82 SESAME AND LILIES 

know nothing of your own faculties or circumstances ; 
YOU fancy that^ among your damp^ flat^ fat fields of 
clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the French- 
n:an among his bronzed vines^ or the Italian under 
his volcanic cliflfe; — that Art may be learned as 
book-keeping is^ and when learned^ will give you 
more books to keep. You care for pictures^ absolutely, 
no more than you do for the bills pasted on your dead 
walls. There is always room on the walls for the bills 
to be read,^ — ^never for the pictures to be seen. You 
do not know what pictures you have (by repute) in 
the country, nor whether they are false or true, nor 
whether they are taken care of or not; in foreign 
countries, you calmly see the noblest existing pictures 
in the world rotting in abandoned wreck — (in Venice 
you saw the Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the 
palaces containing them), and if you heard that all 
the fine pictures in Europe were made into sand-bags 
to-morrow on the Austrian forts, it would not trouble 
you so much as the chance of a brace or two of game 
less in your own bags, in a day's shooting. That is 
your national love of Art. 

35. IV. You' have despised nature; that is to say, 
all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. 
The French revolutionists made stables of the cathe- 
drals of France; you have made racecourses of the 
cathedrals of the earth. Your one conception of plea- 
ure is to drive in railroad carriages around their aisles, 
and eat off their altars.^ You have put a railroad- 

^ I meant that the beautiful places of the world — Switzer- 
land, Italy, South Germany, and so on — are, indeed, the 



SESAME AND LILIES 83 

bridge over the falls of Schaflhausen. You have tun- 
nelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel ; you have 
destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva; 
there is not a quiet valley in England that you have 
not filled with bellowing fire ; there is no particle left 
of English land which you have not trampled coal 
ashes into^ — ^nor any foreign city in which the spread 
of your presence is not marked among its fair old 
streets and happy gardens by a consuming white 
leprosy of new hotels and perfumers^ shops : the Alps 
themselves, which your own poets used to love so rev- 
erently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear- 
garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide 
down again, with ^^shrieks,of delight/^ When you are 
past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to 
say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their 
valleys with gun-powder blasts, and rush home, red 
with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with 
convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think near- 
ly the two sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in 
humanity, taking the deep inner significance of them, 
are the English mobs in the valley of Chamouni, 
amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers; and 
the Swiss vintagers of Zurich expressing their Chris- 
truest cathedrals — places to be reverent in, and to worship 
in: and that we only care to drive through them; and to 
eat and drink at their most sacred places. 

1 1 was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding all 
the river shore at Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth, 
from the mere drift of soot-laden air from places many miles 
away. 



84 SESAME AND LILIES 



tian thanks for the gift of the vine, by assembling in*^ 
knots in the '^'towers of the vineyards/* and slowly 
loading and firing horse-pistols from morning till 
evening. It is pitiful, to have dim conceptions of 
dntv: more pitiful, it seems to me. to have concep- 
tions like these, of mirth. 

36. Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no 
need of words of mine for proof of this. I will merely 
print one of the newspaper paragraphs which I am in 
the habit of cutting out and throwing into my store- 
drawer: here is one from a '•'Daily Telegraph*' of 
an early date this year (1S65) : (date which, though 
by me carelessly left unmarked, is easily discoverable; 
for on the back of the slip, there is the announce- 
ment that "yesterday the seventh of the special serv- 
ices of this year was performed by the Bishop of 
Eipon in St. Paul's'*) ; it relates only one of such 
facts as happen now daily; this by chance having 
taken a form in which it came before the coroner. 
I will print the paragraph in red. Be sure, the 
facts themselves are written in that color, in a book 
which we shall all of us. literate or illiterate, have to 
read our page of, some day.^ 

^"An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Eichards, 
deputy coroner, at the White Horse Tavern, Christ 
Church, Spitalfields, respecting the death of Michael 
Collins, aged 58 years. Mary Collins, a miserable- 
looking woman, said that she lived with the deceased 

• 
[^ In his own edition. Mr. Buskin printed, in red ink, all 
the rest of § 36, except his footnotes.] 



n 



SESAME AND LILIES 85 

and his son in a room at 2, Cobb's Court, Christ 
Church. Deceased was a '^translator' of boots. 
Witness went out and bought old boots; deceased 
and his son made them into good ones, and then wit- 
ness sold them for what she could get at the shops, 
which was very little indeed. Deceased and his son 
used to work night and day to try and get a little 
bread and tea, and pay for the room (25. a week), 
so as to keep the home together. On Friday night 
week deceased got up from his bench and began to 
shiver. He threw down his boots, saying, ^Some- 
body else must finish them when I am gone,^ for I can 
do no more.' There was no fire, and he said, ^I 
would be better if I was warm.' Witness therefore 
took two pairs of translated boots^ to sell at the shop, 
but she could only get 14:d. for the two pairs, for the 
people at the shop said, ^We must have our profit.' 
Witness got 14 lb. of coal, and a little tea and bread. 
Her son sat up the whole night to make the ^trans- 
lations,' to get money, but deceased died on Saturday 
morning. The family never had enough to eat. — 
Coroner: '^It seems to me deplorable that you did 
not go into the workhouse.' Witness: ^We wanted 
the comforts of our little home.' A juror asked what 
the comforts were, for he only saw a little straw in the 
corner of the room, the windows of which were broken. 
The witness began to cry, and said that they had a 
quilt and other little things. The deceased said he 

^ One of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, 
for the good of all classes, in our future arrangements, _ 
must be that they wear no * translated ' ' article of dress. 



86 SESAME AND LILIES 

never would go into the workhouse. In summer, when 
the season was good, they sometimes made as much 
as 10.5?. profit in the week. They then always saved 
towards the next week, which was generally a bad 
one. In winter they made not half so much. For 
three years they had been getting from bad to worse. 
— Cornelius Collins said that he had assisted his 
father since 1847. They used to work so far into the 
night that both nearly lost their eyesight. Witness 
now had a film over his eyes. Five years ago de- 
ceased applied to the parish for aid. The reliev- 
ing officer gave him a 4 lb. loaf, and told him if he 
came again he should get the ^stones.^^ That dis- 

^ [I. €., working at breaking stones in the road.] This 
abbreviation of the penalty of useless labor is curiously co- 
incident in verbal form with a certain passage which some of 
us may remember. [See Matthew vii. 9.] It may perhaps 
be well to preserve beside this paragraph another cutting 
out of my store-drawer, from the Morning Post, of about a 
parallel date, Friday, March 10th, 1865:— ''The salons of 

Mme. C , who did the honors with clever imitative grace 

and elegance, were crowded with princes, dukes, marquises, 
and counts — in fact, with the same male company as one 
meets at the parties of the Princess Metternich and Madame 
Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and members of 
Parliament were present, and appeared to enjoy the ani- 
mated and dazzlingly improper scene. On the second floor 
the supper tables were loaded with every delicacy of the 
season. That your readers may form some idea of the 
dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I copy the menu of 
the supper, which was served to all the guests (about 200) 
seated at four o'clock. Choice Yquem, Johannisberg, Laf- 
fitte, Tokay, and champagne of the finest vintages were 



SESAME AND LILIES 87 

gusted deceased^ and he . would have nothing to do 
with them since. They got worse and worse until 
last Friday week, when they had not even a half- 
penny to buy a candle. Deceased then lay down on 
the straw, and said he could not live till morning. — 
A juror : ^You are dying of starvation yourself, and 
you ought to go into the house until the summer.^ — 
Witness : ^If we went in, we should die. When we 
come out in the summer, we should be like people 
dropped from the sky. No one would know us, and 
we would not have even a room. I could work now 
if I had food, for my sight would get better,^ Dr. 
G. P. Walker said deceased died from syncope, from 
exhaustion from want of food. The deceased had had 
no bedclothes. For four months he had had nothing 
but bread to eat. There was not a particle of fat in 
the body. There was no disease, but if there had 
been medical attendance, he might have survived the 
syncope or fainting. The coroner having remarked 

served most lavishly throughout the morning. After sup- 
per, dancing was resumed with increased animation, and the 
ball terminated with a chatne diabolique and a cancan 
d'enfer at seven in the morning. (Morning service — 'Ere 
the fresh lawns appeared, under the opening eyelids of the 
Morn.') Here is the menu: — 'Consomme de volaille ^ la 
Bag'ration: 16 hors-d ^oeuvres varies. Bouchees k la Talley- 
rand. Saumons froids, sauce Kavigote. Filets de boeuf en 
Bellevue;, timbales milanaises, chaudfroid de gibier. Dindes 
truffees. Pates de foies gras, buissons d 'ecrevisses, salades 
v^netiennes, gelees blanches aux fruits, gateaux mancini, 
parisiens et parisiennes. Fromages glaces. Ananas. Des- 
sert. ' ' ' 



88 SESAME AND LILIES 

upon the painful nature of the case^ the jury returned 
the following verdict, '^That deceased died from ex- 
haustion from want of food and the common neces- 
saries of life ; also through want of medical aid/ ^^ 

37. '*Why would witness not go into the work- 
house?^^ you ask. Well, the poor seem to have a 
prejudice against the workhouse which the rich have 
not; for of course every one. who takes a pension 
from Government goes into the workhouse on a grand 
scale :^ only the workhouses for the rich dp not in- 
volve the idea of work, and should be called play- 
houses. But the poor like to die independently, it 
appears; perhaps if we made the play-houses for 
them pretty and pleasant enough, or gave them their 
pensions at home, and allowed them a little introduc- 
tory peculation with the public money, their minds 
might be reconciled to the conditions. Meantime, 
here are the facts : we make our relief either so in- 
sulting to them, or so painful, that they rather die 
than take it at our hands; or, for third alternative, 
we leave them so untaught and foolish . that they 
starve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not know- 
ing what to do, or what to ask. I say, you despise 
compassion; if you did not, such a newspaper para- 
graph would be as impossible in a Christian country 
as a deliberate assassination permitted in its public 



^ Please observe this statement, and think of it, and con- 
sider how it happens that a poor old woman will be ashamed 
to take a shilling a week from the country — but no one is 
ashamed to take a pension of a thousand a year. 



SESAME AND LILIES ^ 89 

streets.^ "Christian^^ did I say? Alas, if we were 

^ I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the Pall Mall 
Gazette established; for the power of the press in the hands 
of highly educated men, in independent position, and of 
honest purpose, may indeed become all t^at it has been 
hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor will therefore, I 
doubt not, pardon me, in that, by very reason of my respect 
for the journal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its 
third number, page 5, which was wrong in every word of it, 
with the intense wrongness which only an honest man can 
achieve who has taken a false turn of thought in the outset, 
and is following it, regardless of consequences. It contained 
at the end this notable passage: — 

' ' The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction — aye, 
and the bedstead and blankets of affliction, are the very ut- 
most that the law ought to give to outcasts merely as out- 
casts,^ ^ I merely put beside this expression of the gentle- 
manly mind of England in 1865, a part of the message 
which Isaiah was ordered to '^lift up his voice like a 
trumpet^* in declaring to the gentlemen of his day: '^Ye 
fast for strife, and to smite with the fist of wickedness. 
Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal thy bread 
to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out 
(margin, * afflicted') to thy house?'' The falsehood on 
which the writer had mentally founded himself, as previously 
stated by him, was this: ^^To confound the functions of 
the dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers 
of a charitable institution is a great and pernicious error." 
This sentence is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that 
its substance must be thus reversed in our mind before we 
can deal with any existing problem of national distress. 
* ' To understand that the dispensers of the poor-rates are the 
almoners of the nation, and should distribute its alms with a 
gentleness and freedom of hand as much greater and 
franker than that possible to individual charity, as the 
collective national wisdom and power may be supposed 



^0 SESAME AND LILIES 

but wholesomely ^n-Christian^ it would be impossi- 
ble : it is our imaginary Christianity that helps us to 
commit these crimes, for we revel and luxuriate in our 
faith, lOr the lewd sensation of it ; dressing it up, like 
everything else, m fiction. The dramatic Christianity 
of the organ and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight- 
revival — the Christianity which we do not fear to 
mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our play about 
the devil, in our Satanellas, — Eoberts, — Fausts; 
chanting hymns through traceried windows for back- 
ground effect, and artistically modulating the "Dio" 
through variation on variation of mimicked prayer 
(while we distribute tracts, next day, for the benefit 
of uncultivated swearers, upon what we suppose to 
be the signification of the Third Commandment) ; — 
this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired, Christianity, we are 
triumphant in, and draw back the hem of our robes 
from the touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to 
do a piece of common Christian righteousness in a 
plain English word or deed; to make Christian law 
any rule of life, and found one National act or hope 
thereon, — we know too well what our faith comes to 
for that! You might* sooner get lightning out of 
incense smoke than true action or passion out of your 
modern English religion. You had better get rid of 
the sm.oke, and the organ pipes, both : leave them, 

greater than those of any single person, is the foundation 
of all law respecting pauperism.'' (Since this was written 
the Pall Mall Gazette has become a mere party paper — like 
the rest; but it writes well, and does more good than mis- 
chief on the whole.) 



SESAME AND LILIES 91 

and the Gothic windows, and the painted glass, to the 
property man; give up your carburetted hydrogen 
ghost in one healthy expiration, and look after Laz- 
arus at the doorstep. For there is a true Church 
wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that 
is the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or 
ever shall be. ^ 

38. All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, 
I repeat, you nationally despise. You have, indeed, 
men among you who do not; by whose work, by 
whose strength, by whose life, by whose death, you 
live, and never thank them. Your wealth, your 
amusement, your pride, would all be alike impossible, 
but for those whom you scorn or forget. The police- 
man, wlio is walking up and dow^n the black lane all 
night to watch the guilt you have created there ; and 
may have his brains beaten out, and be maimed for 
life, at any moment, and never be thanked; the sailor 
wrestling with the sea's rage; the»quiet student por- 
ing over his book or his vial; the common worker, 
without praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling his 
task as your horses drag your carts, hopeless, and 
spurned of all; these are the men by whom England 
lives; but they are not the nation; they are only the 
body and nervous force of it, acting still from old 
habit in a convulsive perseverance, while the mind is 
gone. Our National wish and purpose are only to be 
amused ; our National religion is the performance of 
church ceremonies, and preaching of soporific truths 
(or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, while 
we amuse ourselves; and the necessitv for this amuse- 



92 SESAME AND LILIES 

ment is fastening on ns^ as a feverous disease of 
parched throat and wandering eyes — senseless^ dis- 
solute, merciless. How literally that word i)is-Ease, 
the Jfegation and possibility of Ease, expresses the 
entire moral state of our English Industry and its 
Amusements ! ^ 

39. When men are rightly occupied, their amuse- 
ment grows out of their work, as the color-petals out 
of a fruitful flower; — when they are faithfully help- 
ful and compassionate, all their emotions become 
steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as 
the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no 
true business, we pour our whole masculine energy 
into the false business of money-making; and having 
no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed 
up for us to play with, not innocently, as children 
with dolls, but guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous 
Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, which men 
had to dig to detect. The justice we do not execute, 
we mimic in the novel and on the stage; for the 
beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute the meta- 
morphosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature 
of us imperatively requiring awe and s.orrow of some 
kind) for the noble grief we should have borne with 
our fellows, and the pure tears we should have wept 
with them, we gloat over the pathos of the police 
court, and gather the night-dew of the grave. 

40. It is difficult to estimate the true significance 
of these things; the facts are frightful enough; — the 
measure of national fault involved in them is perhaps 
not as great as it would at first seem. We permit, or 



SESAME AND LILIES 93 

cause, thousands of deaths daily, but we mean no 
harm; we set fire to houses, and ravage peasants' 
fields, yet we should be sorry to find we had injurec? 
anybody. We are still kind at heart; still capable 
of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at the 
end of his long life, having had much power with the 
.public, being plagued in some serious matter by a 
reference to "^"^public opinion/^ uttered the impatient 
exclamation, ^*^The public is just a great baby V' And 
the reason that I have allowed all these graver sub- 
jects of thought to mix themselves up with an in- 
quiry into methods of reading, is that, the more I 
see of our national faults or miseries, the more they 
resolve themselves into conditions of childish illiter- 
ateness and want of education in the most ordinary 
habits of thought.- It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfish- 
ness, not dullness of brain, which we have to lament ; 
but an unreachable schoolboy^s recklessness, only dif- 
fering from the true schoolboy^s in its incapacity of 

r-7being helped, because it acknowledges no master. 

/\^ 41. There is a curious type of us given in one of 
the lovely, neglected works of the last of our great 
painters. It is a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale church- 
yard, and of its brook, and valley, and hills, and 
folded morning sky beyond. And unmindful alike 
of these, and of the dead who have left these for 
other valleys and for other skies, a group of sehool- 
boys have piled their little books upon a grave, to 
strike them off with stones. So, also, we play with 
the words of the dead that would teach us, and strike 
them far from us with our bitter, reckless will ; little 



94 SESAME AND LILIES 

thinking that those leaves which the wind scatters had 
been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the 
seal of an enchanted vault — jisly, the gate of a great 
city of sleeping kings, who would awakje for ns, and 
walk with ns, if we knew but how to call them by 
their names. How often, even if we lift the marble 
entrance gate, do we but wander among those old 
kings in their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, 
and stir the crowns on their foreheads, and still they 
are silent to us, and seem but a dusty imagery; be- 
cause we know not the incantation of the heart that 
would wake them: — ^which, if they once heard, they 
would start up to meet us in their power of long ago, 
narrowly to look upon us, and consider us; and, as 
the fallen kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, say- 
ing, "Art thou also become weak as we — ^art thou 
also become one of us?'^ so would these kings, with 
their undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet, us, sajdng, 
"Art thou also become pure and mighty of heart as 
we ? art thou also become one of us ?*^ 

42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — ^*magnani- 
mous'" — to be this, is indeed to be great in life: to 
become this increasingly, is, indeed, to "advance in 
life,'' — in life itself — not in the trappings of it. My 
friends, do you remember that old Scythian custom, 
when the head of a house died ? How he was dressed 
in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, and carried 
about to his friends' houses ; and each of them placed 
him at his tablets head, and all feasted in his presence ? 
Suppose it were offered to you in plain words, as it 
is offered to you in dire facts, that you should gain 



SESAME AND LILIES 95 

this Scythian honor, gradually, while you yet thought 
yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this : You 
shall die slowly; your blood shall daily grow cold, 
your flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as a 
rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall fade 
from you, and sink through the earth into the ice of 
Caina; but, day by day, your body shall be dressed 
more gaily, and set in higher chariots, and have more 
orders on its breast — crowns on its head, if you will. 
Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it, 
crowd after it up and down the streets; build pal- 
aces for it, feast with it at their tables^ heads all the 
night long; your soul shall stay enough within it to 
know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden 
dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown- 
edge on the skull ; — no more. Would you take the of- 
fer, verbally made by the death-angel? Would the 
meanest among us take it, think you ? Yet practically 
and verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a meas- 
ure; many of us grasp at it in its fulness of horror. 
Every man accepts it, who desires to advance in life 
without knowing what life is ; who means only that he 
is to get more horses, and more footmen, and more 
fortune, and miore public honor, and — not more per- 
sonal soul. He only is advancing in life, whose heart 
is getting softer, whose blood warmer, wliubu Unain 
quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living peace. 
And the men who have this life in them are the true 
lords or kings of the earth — they, and they only. All 
other kingships, so far as they are true, are only the 
practical issue and expression of theirs; if less than 



96 SESAME AND LILIES 

this^ they are either dramatic royalties, — costly shows, 
set off, indeed, with real jewels instead of tinsel — but 
still only the toys of nations ; or else, they are no roy- 
alties at all, but t}Tannies, or the mere active and 
practical issue of national folly; for which reason. I 
have said of them elsewhere, "Visible governments 
are the toys of some nations, the diseases of others, 
the harness of some, the burdens of more/^ 

43. But I have no words for the wonder with 
which I hear Kinghood still spoken of, even among 
thoughtful men, as if governed nations were a per- 
sonal propert}', and might be bought and sold, or oth- 
erwise acquired, as sheep, of whose flesh their king, 
was to feed, and whose fleece he was to gather; as if 
Achilles' indignant epithet of base kings, "people- 
eating/*' were the constant and proper title of all 
monarchs; and enlargement of a king^s dominion 
meant the same thing as the increase of a private 
man's estate ! Kings who think so, however power- 
ful, can no more be the true kings of the nation fhan 
gadflies are the kings of a horse; they suck it, and 
may drive it wild, but do not guide it. They, and 
, their courts, and their armies are, if one could see 
clearly, only a large species of marsh mosquito, with 
bayonet proboscis and melodious, band-mastered 
trumpeting, in the summer air; the twilight being, 
perhaps, sometimes fairer, but hardly more whole- 
some, for its glittering mists of midge companies. 
The true kiags, meanwhile, rule quietly, if at aU, and 
hate ruling: too many of them make "il gran rifiiito;^^ 
and if thev do not, the mob, as soon as thev are likely 



SESAME AND LILIES 97 

to become useful to it, is pretty sure to make its '^gran 
rifiiito^' of them. 

4:4:. Yet the visible king may also be a true one, 
some day, if ever day comes when he will estimate his 
dominion by the force of it, — ^not the geographical 
boundaries. It matters very little whether Trent cuts 
you a cantel out here, or Ehine rounds you a castle 
less there. But it does matter to you, king of men, 
whether you can verily say to this man, "Go,^' and 
he goeth; and to another, ^^Come,^^ and he cometh. 
Whether you can turn your people, as you can Trent 
— and where it is that you bid them come, and where 
go. It matters to you, king of men, whether your 
people hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live 
by you. You may measure your dominion by multi- 
tudes, better than by miles; and count degrees of 
love-latitude, not from, but to, a wonderfully warm 
and infinite equator. 

45. Measure ! — nay, you cannot measure. Who 
shall measure the difference between the power of 
those who "do and teach,^^ and who are greatest in 
the kingdoms of earth, as of heaven — and the power 
of those who undo, and consume — whose power, at 
the fullest, is only the power of the moth and the 
rust ? Strange ! to think how the Moth-kings lay up 
treasures for the moth; and the Eust-kings, who are 
to their people^s strength as rust to armor, lay up 
treasures for the rust; and the Eobber-kings, treas- 
ures for the robber ; but how few kings have ever laid 
up treasures that needed no guarding — treasures of 
which, the more thieves there were, the better ! Broid- 



98 SESAME AND LILIES 

ered robe^ only to be rent; helm and sword, only to be 
dimmed ; jewel and gold, only to be scattered ; — ^there 
have been three kinds of kings who have gathered 
these. Suppo&e there ever should arise a Fonrth order 
of kings, who had read, in some obscure writing of 
long ago, that there was a Fourth kind of treasure, 
which the jewel and gold could not equal, neither 
should it be valued with pure gold^ A web made fair 
in the weaving, by Athena' s shuttle ; an armor, forged 
in divine fire by Yulcanian force ; a gold to be mined 
in the very sun's red heart, where he sets over the 
Delphian cliffs ; — deep-pictured tissue ; — impenetra- 
ble armor ; — potable gold ! — the three great Angels 
of Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and 
waiting at the posts of our doors, to lead us, with 
their winged power, and guide us, with their unerring 
eyes, by the path which no fowl knoweth, and which 
the -vulture's eye has not seen ! Suppose kings should 
ever arise, who heard and believed this word, and at 
last gathered and brought forth treasures of — Wis- 
dom — for their people? 

46. Think what an amazing business that would 
be ! How inconceivable, in the state of our present 
national wisdom! That we should bring up our 
peasants to a book exoTt- -e instead of a bayonet exer- 
cise! — organize, drill, maintain with pay, and good 
generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of armies of 
stabbers ! — find national amusement in reading-rooms 
as rifle-grounds ; give prizes for a fair shot at a fact, 
as well as for a leaden splash on a target. What an 
absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the 



SESAME AND LILIES 99 

wealth of the capitalists of civilized nations should 
ever come to support literature instead of war ! 

47. Have yet patience with me, while I read you a 
single sentence out of the only book, properly to be. 
called a book/ that I have yet written myself, the one 
that will stand (if anything stand) surest and longest 
of all work of mine : — 

^ ' It is one very awful form of the operation of wealtli in 
Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports 
unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much money tO' 
support them; for most of the men who wage such, wage 
them gratis; but for an unjust war, men's bodies and souls 
have both to be bought; and the best tools of war for them 
besides, which makes such war costly to the maximum ; not 
to speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, be- 
tween nations which have not grace nor honesty enough in 
all their multitudes to buy an hour's peace of mind with; 
as, at present, France and England, purchasing of each 
other ten millions sterling worth of consternation, annually 
(a remarkably light crop, half thorns and half aspen leaves, 
sown, reaped, and granaried by the 'science' of the modern 
political economist, teaching covet ousness instead of truth). 
And, all unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of 
the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are 
repaid by subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to 
have no will ir the matter, the capitalists' will being the 
primary root of the war; but its real root is the covetousness 
of the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frank- 
ness, or justice, and bringirg about, therefore, in due time, 
his own separate loss and punishment to each person. ' ' 

48. France and England literally, observe, buy 
panic of each other ; they pay, each of them, for ten 
thousand-thousand pounds' worth of terror, a year. 

[^Unto this Last; in the essay entitled ''Ad Valorem."] 



100 SESAME AND LILIES 

Now suppose, instead of buying these ten millions' 
worth of panic annually, they made up their minds to 
be at peace with each other, and buy ten millions^ 
worth of knowledge annually; and that each nation 
spent its ten thousand-thousand pounds a year in 
founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal 
museums, royal gardens, and places of rest. Might 
it not be better somewhat for both French and Eng- 
lish? 

49. It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. 
N'evertheless, I hope it will not be long before royal 
or national libraries will be founded in every con- 
siderable city, with a royal series of boolvS in them; 
the same series in every one of them, chosen books, 
the best in every kind, prepared for that national 
series in the most perfect way possible; their text 
printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, 
and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, 
beautiful, and strong, and thorough as examples of 
binders' . work ; and that these great libraries will be 
accessible to all clean and orderly persons at all times 
of the day and evening ; strict law being enforced for 
this cleanliness and quietness. 

50. I could shape for you other plans, for art gal- 
leries, and for natural history galleries, and for many 
precious — many, it seems to me, needful — ^things; 
but this book plan is the easiest and needfuUest, and 
would prove a considerable tonic to what we call our 
British Constitution, which has fallen dropsical of 
late, and has an evil thirst, and evil hunger, and 
wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn laws 



SESAME AND LILIES 101 

repealed for it ; try if you cannot get corn laws estab- 
lished for it^ dealing in a better bread ; — bread made 
of that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, 
which opens doors; — doors, not of robbers', but of 
Kings^ Treasuries. 



NOTE TO § 30 

Eespecting the increase of rent by the deaths of the 
poor, for evidence of which, see the preface to the 
Medical Officer's Eeport to the Privy Council, just 
published, there are suggestions in its preface which 
will make some stir among us, I fancy, respecting 
which let me note these points following : — 

There are two theories on the subject of land now 
abroad, and in contention; both false. 

The first is that, by Heavenly law, there have 
always existed, and must continue to exist, a certain 
number of hereditarily sacred persons to whom the 
earth, air, and water of the world belong, as personal 
property; of which earth, air, and water, these per- 
sons may, at their pleasure, permit, or forbid, the rest 
of the human race to eat, to breathe or to drink. 
This theory is not for many years longer tenable. 
The adverse theory is that a division of the land of 
the world among the mob of the world would immedi- 
ately elevate the said mob into sacred personages; 
that houses would then build themselves and corn 
grow of itself; and that everybody would be able to 
live, without doing any work for his living. This 
theory would also be found highly untenable in prac- 
tice. 



102 SESAME AND LILIES 

It will, however, require some rough experiments 
and rougher catastrophes, before the generality of 
persons will be convinced that no law concerning any- 
thing — least of all concerning land, for either hold- 
ing or dividing it, or renting it high, or renting it 
low — would be of the smallest ultimate use to the peo- 
ple, so long as the general contest for life, and for the 
means of life, remains one of mere brutal competition. 
That contest, in an unprincipled nation, will take one 
deadly form or another, whatever laws you make 
against it. For instance, it would be an entirely 
wholesoni;^ law for England, if it could be carried, 
that maximum limn:^ should be assigned to incomes 
according to classes: and that everv nobleman's in- 
come should be paid to him as a fixed salary or pen- 
sion by the nation : and not squeezed by him in vari- 
able sums, at discretion, out of the tenants of his land. 
But if you could get such a law passed to-morrow, 
and if, which would be farther necessary, you could 
fix the value of the assigned incomes by making a 
given weight of pure bread legal-tender for a given 
sum, a twelve-month would not pass before another 
currency would have been tacitly established, and the 
power of accumlated wealth would have reasserted 
itself in some other article, or some other imaginary 
sign. There is only one cure for public distress — and 
that is public education, directed to make men 
thoughtful, merciful, and just. There are, indeed, 
many laws conceivable which would gradually better 
and strengthen the national temper; but, for the 
most part, they are such as the national temper must 



SESAME AND LILIES . 103 

be much bettered before it. would bear. A nation in 
its youth may be helped by laws, as a weak child by 
back-boards, but when it is old it cannot that way 
strengthen its crooked spine. 

And besides ; the problem of land, at its woi^t, is a 
bye one; distribute the earth as you will, the princi- 
pal question remains inexorable, — who is to dig it? 
Which of us, in brief words, is to do the hard and 
dirty work for the rest — and for what pay? Who 
is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what 
pay? Who is to do no work, and for what pay? 
And there are curious moral and religious questions 
connected with these. How far is it lawful to suck a 
portion of the soul out of a great many persons, in 
order to put the abstracted psychical quantities to- 
gether and make one very beautiful or ideal soul ? If 
we had to deal with mere blood instead of spirit (and 
thp thing might literally be done — as* it has been 
done with infants before now), — so that it were pos- 
sible by taking a certain quantity of blood from the 
arms of a given number of the mob, and putting it all 
into one person, to make a more azure-blooded gentle- 
man of him, the thing would of CQurse be managed; 
but secretly, I rNhould conceive. But now, because it 
is brain and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, 
it can be done quite openly, and we live, we gentle- 
njen, on delicatest prey, after the rnanner of weasels ; 
that is to say, we keep a certain number of clowns 
di.2fging and ditching, and generally stupefied, in or- 
der that we, being fed gratis, may have all the think- 
ing and feeling to ourselves. Yet there is a great deal 



104 SESAME AND LILIES 

to be said for this. A highly bred and trained Eng- 
lish, French, Austrian, or Italian gentleman (much 
more a lady) is a great production, — a better produc- 
tion than most statues; being beautifully colored as 
well as shaped, and plus all the brains; a glorious 
thing to look at, a wonderful thing to talk to; and 
you cannot have it, any more than a pyramid or a 
church, but by sacrifice of much contributed life. 
And it is, perhaps, better to build a beautiful human 
creature than a beautiful dome or steeple — and more 
delightful to look up reverently to a creature far 
above us, than to a wall; only the beautiful human 
creature will have some duties to do in return — duties 
of living belfry and rampart — of which presently. 



LECTUEE II.— LILIES. 

OF QUEENS' GAKDENS. 

' * Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert ; let the desert be made 
cheerful, and' bloom as the lily; and the barren places of 
Jordan shall run wild with wood.'' — Isaiah xxxv. i. 
(Septuagint). 

\ ''51. It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is the 
sequel of one previously given, that I should shortly- 
state to you my general intention in both. The ques- 
tions specially proposed to you in the first, namely. 
How and What to Eead, rose out of a far deeper one, 
which it was my endeavor to make you propose ear- 
nestly to yourselves, namely. Why to Eead. I want 
you to feel, with me, that whatever advantage we pos- 
sess in the present day in the diffusion of education 
and of literature, can only be rightly used by any of 
us when we have apprehended clearly what education 
is to lead to, and literature to teach. I wish you to 
see that both well-directed moral training and well- 
chosen reading lead to the possession of a power over 
the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to the 
measure of it, in the truest sense, Mngly ; conferring 
indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men : 
too many other kingships (however distinguished by 
visible insignia or material power) being either spec- 
tral, or tyrannous; — spectral — that is to say, aspf^cts 
and shadows only of royalty, hollow as death, and 

105 



106 SESAME AND LILIES 

whicii only the '^•'likeness of a kingly crown have on f 
or else tyrannous — that is to say, substituting their 
own will for the law of justice and love by which all 
true kings rule. 

52. There is, then, I repeat — and as I want to 
leave this idea witn }'ou, I begin with it, and shall 
end with it — only one pure kind of kingship ; an in- 
evitable and eternal kind, crowned or not: the king- 
ship, namely, which consists in a stronger moral state, 
and a truer thoughtful state, than tliat of others; 
enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise them. 
Observe that word '^^State f we have got into a loose 
way of using it. It means literally the standing and 
stability of a thing ; and you have the full force of it 
in the derived word "statue" — "the immovable 
thing.^' A king's majesty or "sta*te,'^ then, and the 
right of his kingdom to be called a state, depends on 
the movelessness of both : — without tremor, without 
quiver of balance; established and enthroned upon a 
foundation of eternal law which nothing can alter, 
nor overthrow. 

53. Believing that all .literature and all education 
are only useful so far as they tend to confirm this 
calm, beneficent, and therefore kingly, power, — first, 
over ourselves, and, through ourselves over all around 
us — I am now going to ask you to consider with me, 
farther, what special portion or kind of this royal 
authority, arising out of noble education, may rightly 
be possessed by women; and how far they also are 
called to a true queenly power, — not in their house- 
holds merely, but over all within their sphere. And 



SESAME AND LILIES 107 

in what sense^ if they rightly -anderstood and exer- 
cised this royal or gracious influence, the order and 
beauty induced by such benignant power would just- 
ify us in speaking of the territories over which each 
of them reigned, as "Queens^ Gardens/^ 

54. And here, in the very outset, we are met by a 
far deeper question, which — strange though this may 
seem — remains among many of us yet quite unde- 
cided, in spite of its infinite importance. 

We cannot determine what the queenly power of 
women should be, until we are agreed what their ordi- 
nary power should be. We cannot consider how 
education may fit them for any widely extending duty, 
until we are agreed what is their true constant duty. 
And there never was a time when wilder words were 
spoken, or more vain imagination permitted, respect- 
ing this question — quite vital to all social happiness. 
The relations of the womanly to the manly nature, 
their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, seem 
never to have been yet estimated with entire consent. 
We hear of the "mission^^ and of the "rights'^ of 
Woman, as if these could ever be separate from the 
mission and the rights of Man; — as if she and her 
lord were creatures of independent kind, and of irre- 
concilable claim. This, at least, is wrong. And not 
less wrong — perhaps even more foolishly wrong (for 
I will anticipate thus far what I hope to prove) — is 
the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant 
image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and ser- 
vile obedience, and supported altogether in her weak* 
ness, by the preeminence of his fortitude. 



108 SESAME AND LILIES 

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respect- 
ing her who was made to be the helpmate of man. As 
if he could be helped ejBfectiyely by a shadow, or 
worthily by a slave ! 

55. Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at 
some clear and harmonious idea (it must be harmoni- 
ous if it is true) of what womanly mind and virtue 
are in power and office, with respect to man's; and 
how their relations, rightly accepted, aid, and in- 
crease, the vigor, and honor, and authority of both. 

'And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last 
lecture : namely that the first use of education was to 
enable us to consult with the wisest and the greatest 
men on all points of earnest difficulty. That to use 
books rightly, was to go to them for help : to appeal 
to them when our own knowledge and power of 
thought failed : to be led by them into wider sight — 
purer conception — than our own, and receive from 
them the united sentence of the judges and councils 
of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinion. 
Let us do this now. Let us see whether the great- 
est, the wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are 
agreed in any wise on this point : let us hear the tes- 
timony they have left respecting what they held to 
be the true' dignity of woman, and her mode of help 
to man. 

56. And first let us take Shakespeare. 

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no 
heroes; — ^he has only heroines. There is not one 
entirely heroic figure in all his plays, except the slight 
sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for the pur- 



SESAME AND LILIES 109 

poses of the stage ; and the still slighter Valentine in 
"The Two Gentlemen of Verona/' In his labored and 
perfect plays you have no hero. Othello would have 
been one^ if his simplicity had not been so great as to 
leave him the prey of every base practice round him ; 
but he is the only example even approximating to the 
heroic type. Coriolanus — Caesar — Antony stand in 
flawed strength, and fall by their vanities; — Hamlet 
is indolent, and drowsily speculative ; Romeo an impa- 
tient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submis- 
sive to adverse fortune ; Kent, in "King Lear/' is en- 
tirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to 
be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into 
the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, 
is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, com- 
forted, saved, by Eosalind. Whereas there is hardly a 
play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in 
grave hope, and errorless purpose; Cordelia, Desde- 
mona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, 
Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Eosalind, Helena, and last, and 
perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless ; conceived 
in the* highest heroic type of humanity. 

57. Then observe, secondly. 

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by 
the folly or fault of a man ; the redemption, if there 
be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, 
failing that, there is none. The catastrophe of King 
Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, his impa- 
tient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children; 
the virtue of his one true daughter would have saved 
him from all the injuries of the others, unless he had 



110 SESAME AND LILIES 

cast her away from him; as it is, she all but saves 
him. 

Of Othello I need not trace the tale; nor the one 
weakness of his so mighty love; nor the inferiority 
of his perceptive intellect to that even of the second 
woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies in 
wild testimony against his error: — 

*'0h, murderous coxcomb! what should such a fool 
Do with so good a wife?'' 

In ^^Eomeo and Juliet/' the wise and brave strat- 
agem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the 
reckless impatience of her husband. In "The Win- 
ter's Tale," and in "Cymbeline/' the happiness and 
existence of two princely households, lost through 
long years, and imperilled to the death by the folly 
and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last 
by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. 
In "Measure for Measure,'' the foul injustice of the 
judge, and the foul cowardice of the brother, are 
opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine puri- 
ty of a woman. In "Coriolanus," the mother's coun- 
sel, acted upon in time, would have saved her son 
from all evil ; his momentary f orgetf ulness of it is his 
ruin ; her prayer, at last, granted, saves him — not, in- 
deed, from death, but from the curse of living as the 
destroyer of his country. 

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the 
fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked child? — 
of Helena, against the petulance and insult of a care- 



SESAME AND LILIES 111 

less youth? — of the patience of Hero^ the passion of 
Beatrice^ aaid the calmly devoted wisdom of the ^^un- 
.essoned girl/^ who appears among the helplessness, 
the blindness, and the vindictive passions of men, as 
a gentle angel, bringing courage and safety by her 
presence, and defeating the worst malignities of crime 
by what women are fancied most to fail in, — preci- 
sion and accuracy of thought ? 

58. Observe, further, among all the principal fig- 
ures in Shakespeare^s plays, there is only one weak 
woman — Ophelia; and it is because she fails Ham- 
let at the critical moment, and is not, and cannot in 
her nature be, a guide to him when he needs her 
most, that' all the bitter catastrophe follows : Finally, 
though there are three wicked women among the 
principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Eegan, and Goneril, 
they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the 
ordinary laws of life; fatal in their influence also, in 
proportion to the power for good which they have 
abandoned. 

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare^s testimony to 
the position and character of women in iiuman life. 
He represents them as infalli'Jy faithiiil and wise 
counsellors, — in corruptibly just and pure examples, 
— strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot 
save. 

59. Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge 
of the nature of man, — still less in his understand- 
ing of the causes and courses of fate, — but only as 
the writer who has given us the broadest view of the 
conditions and modes of ordinary thought in modern 



112 SESAME AND LILIES 

society, I ask you next to receive the witness of Wal- 
ter Scott. 

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as 
of no value, and though the early romantic poetry is 
very beautiful, its testimony is of no weight, other 
than that of a boy^s ideal. But his true works, stud- 
ied from Scottish life, bear a true witness; and, in 
the whole range of these, there are but three men who 
reach the heroic type^ — Dandie Dinmont, Eob Eoy, 
and Claverhouse; of these, one is a border farmer; 
another a freebooter; the third a soldier in a bad 
cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only 
in their courage and faith, together with a strong, 
but uncultivated, or mistakenly applied, intellectual 
power; while his younger men are the gentlemanly 
playthings of fantastic fortune, and only by aid (or 
accident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the 
trials they involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, 
or consistent character, earnest in a purpose wisely 
conceived, or dealing with forms of hostile evil, defi- 
nitely challenged and resolutely subdued, there is no 
trace in his conceptions of young men. Whereas in 

^ I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, 
to have noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal 
of other great characters of men in the Waverley novels — 
the selfishness and narrowness of thought in Eedgauntlet, 
the weak religious enthusiasm in Edward Glendinning, and 
the like; and I ought to have noticed that there are several 
quite perfect characters sketched sometimes in the back- 
grounds; three — let us accept joyously this courtesy to Eng- 
land and her soldiers — are English officers : Colonel Gardiner, 
Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering. 



r 



SESAME AND LILIES 113 

his imaginations of women, — in the characters of 
Ellen Douglas, of Flora Maclvor, Eose Bradwardine, 
Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, 
Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans, — 
with endless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intel- 
lectual power, we find in all a quite infallible sense 
of dignity and justice ; a fearless, instant, and untir- 
ing self-sacrifice to even the appearance of duty, 
much more to its real claims; and, finally, a patient 
wisdom of deeply restrained affection, which does in- 
finitely more than protect its objects from a momen- 
tary error; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts 
the characters of the unworthy lovers, until, at the 
close of the tale, we are just able, and no more, to 
take patience in hearing of their unmerited success. 

So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shake- 
speare, it is the woman who watches over, teaches, 
and guides the youth ; it is never, by any chance, the 
youth who watches over, or educates, his mistress. 

60. Next, take, though more briefly, graver testi- 
mony — that of the great Italians and Greeks. You 
know well the plan of Dante's great poem — that it 
is a love-poem to his dead lady; a song of praise for 
her watch over his soul. Stooping only to pity, never 
to love, she yet saves him from destruction — saves 
him from hell. He is going eternally astray in de- 
spair; she comes down from heaven to his help, and 
throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, in- 
terpreting for him the most difficult truths, divine 
and human; and leading him, with rebuke upon re- 
buke, from star to star. 



114 SESAME AND LILIES 

I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; if I began, 
I could not cease : besides, you might think this 
a wild imagination of one poet's heart. So I will 
rather read to you a few Verses on the deliberate writ- 
ing of a knight of Pisa to his living lady, wholly 
characteristic of the feeling of all the noblest men of 
the thirteenth, or early fourteenth, century, preserved 
among many other such records of knightly honor 
and love, which Dante Eossetti has gathered for us 
from among the early Italian poets. 

^^For lo! thy law is passed 
That this my love should manifestly be 

To serve and honor thee: 
And so I do; and my delight is full, 
Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 

*' Without almost, I am all rapturous, 
Since thus my will was set: 
To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence; 
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 
A pain or a regret. 
But on thee dwells my every thought and sense; 
. Considering that from thee all virtues spread 

As from a fountain head, — 
That hi thy gift is wisdom's test avail j 

And honor without fail; 
With whom each sovereign good dwells separate. 
Fulfilling the pdk-f ection of thy state. ^ 

'*Lady, since I conceived 
Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart 

My life has been apart 
Jn shining brightness and the place of truth; 



SESAME AND LILIES 115 

Which till that time, good sooth, 
Groped among shadows in a darkened place, 
, Where many hours and days 

It hardly ever had remembered good. 

But now my servitude 
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 

A man from a wild beast 
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 

61. You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight 
would have had a lower estimate of women than this 
Christian lover. His spiritual subjection to them was 
indeed not so absolute : but as regards their own per- 
sonal character, it was only because you could not 
have followed me so easily, that I did not take the 
Greek women instead of Shakespeare's ; and instance, 
for chief ideal types of human beauty and faith, the 
simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; the 
divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra ; the play- 
ful kindness and simple princess-life of happy Nau- 
sicaa ; the housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with 
its watch upon the sea; the ever patient, fearless, 
hopelessly devoted piety of the sister and daughter, 
in Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb- 
like and silent; and, finally, the expectation of the 
resurrection, made clear to the soul of the Greeks in 
the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, to 
save her husband, had passed calmly through the bit- 
terness of death. 

62. Now I could multiply witness upon witness of 
this kind upon you if I had time. I would take 
Chaucer, and show you why he wrote a. Legend of 



116 SESAME AND LILIES 

Good Women; but no Legend of Good Men.- I 
would take Spenser, and show you how all his fairy 
knights are sometimes deceived and sometimes van- 
quished; but the soul of Una is never darkened, and 
the spear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could 
go back into the mythical teaching of the most an- 
cient times, and show you how the great people — by 
one of whose princesses, it was appointed that the 
Law-giver of all the earth should be educated, rather 
than by his own kindred : — how that great Egyptian 
people, wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of 
Wisdom the form of a woman; and into her hand, 
for a symbol, the weaver^s shuttle; and how the name 
and the form of that spirit, adopted, believed, and 
obeyed by the Greeks, became that Athena of the 
olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to faith in whom you 
owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most pre- 
cious in art, in literature, or in types of national 
virtue. 

63. But I will not wander into this distant and 
mythical element ; I will only ask you to give its legit- 
imate value to the testimony of these great poets and 
men of the world, — consistent, as you see it is, on 
this head. I will ask you whether it can be supposed 
that these men, in the main work of their lives, are 
amusing themselves with a fictitious and idle view of 
the relations between man and woman; nay, worse 
than fictitious or idle ; for a thing may be imaginary, 
yet desirable, if it were possible; but this, their ideal 
of woman, is, according to our common idea of the 
marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The woman. 



SESAME AND LILIES 117 

we say^ is not to guide, nor even to think for herself. 
The man is always to be the wiser; he is to be the 
thinker, the ruler, the superior in knowledge and dis- 
cretion, as in power. 

64. Is it not somewhat important to make up our 
minds on this matter ? Are all these great men mis- 
taken, or are we? Are Shakespeare and Aeschylus, 
Dante and Homer, merely dressing dolls for us; or, 
worse than dolls, unnatural visions, the realization of 
which, were it possible, would bring anarchy into all 
households and ruin into all affections ? Nay, if you 
can suppose this, take lastly the evidence of facts 
given by the human heart itself. In all Christian 
ages which have been remarkable for their purity of 
progress, there has been absolute yielding of obedient 
devotion, by the lover, to his mistress. I say obedi- 
ent; — ^not merely enthusiastic and worshipping in 
imagination, but entirely subject, receiving from the 
beloved woman, however young, not only the encour- 
agement, the praise, and the reward of all toil, but, 
so far as any choice is open or any question difficult 
of decision, the direction of all toil. That chivalry, 
to the abuse and dishonor of which are attributable 
primarily whatever is cruel in war, unjust in peace, 
or corrupt and ignoble in domestic relations ; and to 
the original purity and power of which we owe the 
defence alike of faith, of law, and of love; — that 
chivalry, I say, in its very first conception of honor- 
abl-e life assumes the subjection of the young knight 
to the command — should it even be the command in 
caprice — of his lady. It assumes this, because its 



118 SESAME AND LILiES 

masters knew that the first and necessary impulse of 
every truly taught and knightly heart is this of blind 
service to its lady : that where that true faith and cap- 
tivitj" are not^ all wayward and wicked passion must 
be ; and that in this rapturous obedience to the single 
love of his youth is the sanctification of all man's 
strength^ and the continuance of all his purposes. 
And this^ not because such obedience would be safe, 
or honorable, were it ever rendered to the unworthy ; 
but because it ought to be impossible for everj^ noble 
youth — it is impossible for every one rightly trained 
—to love any one whose gentle counsel he cannot 
trust, or whose prayerful command he can hesitate to 
obey. 

65. I do not insist by any farther argument on 
this, for I think it should commend itself at once to 
your knowledge of what has been, and to your feeling 
of what should be. You cannot think that the buck- 
ling on of the knight's armor by his lady's hand was 
a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is the type of 
an eternal truth — that the souFs armor is never well 
set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it ; 
and it is only when she braces it loosely that the 
honor of manhood fails. Know you not those lovely 
lines — I would they were learned by all youthful 
ladies of England : — 

^'Ah, wasteful woman! — she who may 
On her sweet self set her own price, 
Knowing he cannot choose but pay — 
How has she cheapened Paradise! 



SESAME AND LILIES 119 

How given for nought her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine, 
Which, spent with due respective thrift, 
Had made brutes men, and men divine 1 ''* 

^^, Thus much, then, respecting the relations of 
lovers I believe you will accept. But what we too 
often doubt is the fitness of the continuance of such a 
relation throughout the whole of human life. We 
think it right in the lover and mistress, not in the 
husband and wife. That is to say, we think that a 
reverent and tender duty is due to one whose affection 
we still doubt, and whose character we as yet do but 
partially and distantly discern; and that this rever- 
ence and duty are to be withdrawn, when the affection 
has become wholly and limitlessly our own, and the 
character has been so sifted and tried that we fear not 
to entrust it with the happiness of our lives. Do you 
not see how ignoble this is, as well as how unreason- 
able? ' Do you not feel that marriage — when it is 
marriage at all — is only the seal which marks the 
vowed transition of temporary into untiring service, 
and of fitful into eternal love? 

67. Bat how, you will ask, is the idea of this 
guiding function of the woman reconcilable with a 
true wifely subjection? Simply in that it is a guid- 
ing, not a determinini^:, function. Let me try to 

^Coventry Patmore YT)ie Angel in the House]. You can- 
not read him too often or too carefully; as far as I know, 
he is the only living poet who always strengthens and puri- 
fies; the others sometimes darken and nearly always depress^ 
and discourage the imagination they deeply seize. 



laO SES.A3IE AND LILIES 

show you briefly how these powers seem to be rightly 
distinguishable. 

We are foolish^ and without excuse foolish, in 
speaking of the •*superioritr^ of one sex to the other, 
as if they could be compared in similar things. Each 
has what the other has not : each completes the other, 
and is completed by the other; they are in nothing 
alike, and the happiness and perfection of both de- 
pends on each asking and receiving from the other 
what the other only can give. 

68. Xow their separate characteis are briefly 
these. The man's power is active, progressive, defen- 
sive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the dis- 
coverer, the defender. His intellect is for specula- 
tion and invention ; his energy for adventure, for war, 
and for conquest wherever war is just, wherever con- 
quest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, 
not for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention 
or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and 
decision. She sees the qualities of thiugs, their claims, 
and their places. Her great function is Praise: she 
enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the 
crown of contest. By her oflBce and place, she is pro- 
tected from all danger and temptation. The man, iu 
his rough work in the open world, must encounter all 
peril, and trial : — to him, therefore, must be the fail- 
ure, the offence, the inevitable error : often he must be 
wounded, or subdued ; often misled ; and always hard- 
ened. But he guards the woman from all this ; within 
his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has 
sought it, need enwr no danger, no temptation, no 




SSKSAME AND LILIES 121 



cause of error or offence. This is the true nature of 
home — it is the place of Peace ; the shelter, not only 
from all injury^ but from all terror^ doubt, and divi- 
sion. In so far as it is not this, it is not home ; so far 
as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and 
the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hos- 
tile society of the outer world is allowed by either 
husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be 
home ; it is then only a part of that outer world which 
you have roofed over, and lighted fire in. But so far 
as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple 'of 
the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before 
whose faces none may come but those whom they can 
receive with love, — so far as it is this, and roof and 
fire are types only of a nobler shade and light, a 
shade as of the rock in a weary land, and light as of 
the Pharos in the stormy sea; — so far it vindicates 
the name, and fulfills the praise, of Home. 

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is al- 
ways round her. The stars only may be over her 
head; the gloww^orm in the night-cold grass may be 
the only fire at her foot ; but home is yet wherever she 
is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, 
better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with ver- 
milion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who 
else were homeless. 

69. This, then, I believe to be — will you not 
idmit it to be? — the woman's true place and power. 
But do not you see that, to fulfill this, we must — as 
far as one can use such terms of a human creature — 
be incapable of error? So far as she rules, all must 



122 SESAME AND LILIES 

be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly^ in- 
corraptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise — wise, 
not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: 
wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, 
but that she may never fail from his side : wise, not 
with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, 
but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely 
variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of 
service — the true changefulness of woman. In that 
great sense — "La donna e mobile,^^ not "Qual pium\ 
al Yentof no, nor yet "Variable as the shade, by 
the light quivering aspen made;'^ but variable as 
the lightj manifold in fair and serene division, that 
it may take the color of all that it falls upon, and 
exalt it. 

70. II. I have been tryin.s' "^bus far, to show you 
what should be the plac^^, and what the power, of 
woman. Xow, sec-on.lly, yro ask, What kind of educa- 
tion is to f:t her for these? 

And if you indeed think this a true conception of 
her office and dignity it will not be difficult to trace 
the course of education which would fit her for the 
one, and raise her to the other. 

The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful per- 
sons now doubt this — is to secure for her such physi- 
cal training and exercise as may confirm her health, 
and perfect her beauty; the highest refinement of 
that beauty being unattainable without splendor of 
activity and of delicate strength. To perfect her 
beauty, I say, and increase its power; it cannot be 
too powerful, nor shed its sacred light too far: only 



SESAME AND LILIES 123 

remember that all physical freedom is vain to pro- 
duce beauty without a corresponding freedom of 
heart. There are two passages of that poet who is 
distinguished, it seems to me, from all others — not by 
power, but by exquisite rightness — which point you 
to the source, and describe to you, in a few syllables, 
the completion of womanly beauty. I will read the 
introductory stanzas, but the last is the one I wish 
you specially to notice : — 

' * Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
Then Nature said, ^A lovelier flovv'er 

^On earth was never sown; 
*This child I to myself will take; 
'She shall be mine, and I will make 

'A lady of my own. 

'^ 'Myself will to my darling be 
'Both law and injpulse; and with me 

' The girl, in rock and plain, 
'In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
'Shall feel an overseeing power 
'To kindle, or restrain. 

' ' * The floating clouds their state shall lend 
'To her, for her the willow bend; 

'Nor shall she fail to see 
'Even in the motions of the storm, 
'Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 

'By silent sympathy. 

' ' ' And vital feelings of delight 
* Shall rear her form to stately height, 
'Her virgin bosom swell. 



13^ SESAME AND LILIES ' 

'Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, 
'While she and I together live, 
' Here in this happy dell. ' ' ' ^ 

'^ Vital feelings of delight/^ observe. There are 
deadly feelings of delight; but the natural ones are 
vital^ necessary to very life. 

And they must be feelings of delight, if they are 
to be vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely 
if you do not make her happy. There is not one 
restraint you put on a good girFs nature — ^there is 
not one check you give to her instincts of affection or 
of effort — which will not be indelibly written on her 
features, with a hardness which is all the more pain- 
ful because it takes away the brightness from the 
eyes of innocence, and the charm from the brow of 
virtue. 

71. This for the means: now note the end. Take 
from the same poet, in two lines, a perfect description 
of womanly beauty— 

''A countenance in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet.'' 

The perfect loveliness of a woman^s countenance 
can only consist in that majestic peace which h 
founded in memory of happy and useful years, — full 
of sweet records; and from the joining of this with 
that yet more majestic childishness, which is still full 
of change and promise; — opening always — modest at 
once, and bright, with hope of better things to be 

^Observe,, it is ''Nature" who is speaking throughout, 
and who says, "while she and I together live.'' 



I 



SESAME AND LILIES 125 

won, and to be bestowed. There is no old age where 
there is still that promise. 

72, Thus, then, you have first to mould her physi- 
cal frame, and then, as the strength she gains will 
permit you, to fill and temper her mind* with all 
knowledge and thoughts which tend to confirm its 
natural instincts of justice, and refine its natural tact 
of love. 

All such knowledge should be given her as may 
enablie her to understand, and even to aid, the work 
of men : and yet it should be given, not as knowledge, 
— ^not as if it were, or could be, for her an object to 
know; but only to feel, and to judge. It is of no mo- 
ijient, as a matter of pride or perfectness in herself, 
whether she knows many languages or one; but it is 
of the utmost, that she should be able to shoW kind- 
ness to a stranger, and to understand the sweetness of 
a stranger's tongue. It is of no moment to her own 
worth or dignity that she should be acquainted with 
this science or that ; but it is of the highest that she 
should be trained in habits of accurate thought; that 
she should understand the meaning, the inevitable- 
ness, and the loveliness of natural laws; and follow 
at least some one path of scientific attainment, as far 
as to the threshold of that bitter Valley of Humilia- 
tion, into which only the wisest and bravest of men 
can descend, owning themselves forever children^ 
gathering pebbles on a boundless shore. It is of lit- 
tle consequence how many positions of cities she 
knows, or how many dates of events, or names of cele- 
brated persons — it is not the object of education to 



126 SESAME AND LILIES 

turn the woman into a dictionary; but it is deeply 
necessary that she should be taught to enter with her 
whole personality into the history she reads; to pic- 
ture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imag- 
ination; to apprehend, with her fine instincts, the 
pathetic circumstances and dramatic relations, which 
the historian too often eclipses by his reasoning, and 
disconnects by his arrangement : it is for her to trace 
the hidden equities of divine reward, and catch sight, 
through the darkness, of the fateful threads of woven 
fire that connect error with retribution. But, chiefly 
of all, she is to be taught to extend the limits of her 
sympathy with respect to that history which is being 
forever determined as the moments pass in which she 
draws her peaceful breath; and to the contemporary 
calamity, which, were it but rightly mourned by her, 
would recur no more hereafter. She is to exercise 
herself in imagining what would be the effects upon 
her mind and conduct, if she were daily brought into 
the presence of the suffering which is not the less real 
because shut from her sight. She is to be taught 
somewhat to understand the nothingness of the pro- 
portion which that little world in which she lives and 
loves, bears to the world in which God lives and loves ; 
— and solemnly she is to be taught to strive that her 
thoughts of piety may not be feeble in proportion to 
the number they embrace, nor her prayer more lan- 
guid than it is for the momentary relief from pain 
of her husband or her child, when it is uttered for 
the multitudes of those who have none to love them, 
— and is, "for all who are desolate and oppressed.^^ 



SESAME AND LILIES 137 

73. Thus far, I think, I have had your concur- 
rence ; perhaps you will not be with me in what I be- 
lieve is most needful for me to say. There is (me 
dangerous science for women — one which they must 
indeed beware how they profanely touch — that of 
theology. Strange, and miserably strange, that while 
they are modest enough to doubt their powers, and 
pause at the threshold of sciences where every step is 
demonstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong, 
and without one thought of incompetency, into that 
science in which the greatest men have trembled, and 
the wisest erred. Strange, that they will com- 
placently and pridefuUy bind up whatever vice or 
folly there is in them, whatever arrogance, petulance, 
or blind incomprehensiveness, into one bitter bundle 
of consecrated myrrh. Strange in creatures born to 
be Love visible, that where they can know least, they 
will condemn first, and think to recommend them- 
selves to their Master, by crawling up the steps of , 
His judgment-throne, to divide it with Him. 
Strangest of all, that they should think they were led 
by the Spirit of the Comforter into habits of mind 
which have become in them the unmixed elements of 
home discomfort; and that they dare to turn the 
Household Gods of Christianity into ugly idols of 
their own ; — spiritual dolls, for them to dress accord- 
ing to their caprice ; and from which their husbands 
must turn away in grieved contempt, lest they should 
be shrieked at for breaking them. • 

74. I believe, then, with this exception, that a 
girl's education should be nearly, in its course and 



128 SESAME AND LILIES 

material of study, the same as a boy's ; but quite dif- 
ferently directed. A woman, in any rank of life, 
ought to know whatever her husband is likely to know, 
but to know it in a different way. His command of 
it should be foundational and progressive : hers, gen- 
eral and accomplished for daily and helpful use. Not 
but that it would often be wiser in men to learn 
things in a womanly sort of way, for present use, and 
to seek for the discipline and training of their men- 
tal powers in such branches of study as will be after- 
wards fittest for social service ; but, speaking broadly, 
a man ought to know any language or science he 
learns, thoroughly — while a woman ought to know 
the same language, or science, only so far as may 
enable her to sympathize in her husband's pleasures, 
and in those of his best friends. 

75. Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far as 
she reaches. There is a wide difference between ele- 
mentary knowledge and superficial knowledge — be- 
tween a firm beginning, and an infirm attempt at 
compassing. A woman may always help her husband 
by what she knows, however little ; by what she half- 
knows, or mis-knows, she will only tease him. 

And indeed, if there were to be any difference 
between a girl's education and a boy's, I should say 
that of the two the girl should be earlier led, as her 
intellect ripens faster, into deep and serious subjects : 
and that her range of literature should be, not more, 
but less frivolous ; calculated to add the qualities of 
patience and seriousness to her natural poignancy of 
thought and quickness of wit; and also to keep her 



SESAME AND LILIES 129 

in a lofty and pure element of thought. I enter not 
now into any question of choice of books ; only let us 
be sure that her books are not heaped up in her lap 
as they fall out of the package of the circulating 
library, wet with the last and lightest spray of the 
fountain of folly. 

76. Or even of the fountain of wit; for with re- 
spect to the sore temptation of novel-reading, it is not 
the badness of a novel that we should dread, so much 
as its overwrought interest. The weakest romance is 
not so stupefying as the lower forms of religious ex- 
citing literature, and the worst romance is not so cor- 
rupting as false history, false philosophy, or false po- 
litical essays. But the best romance becomes danger- 
ous, if, by its excitement, it renders the ordinary 
course of life uninteresting, and increases the morbid 
thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes in which 
we shall never be called upon to act. 

77. I speak therefore of good novels only; and our 
modern literature is particularly rich in types of such. 
Well read, indeed, these books have serious use, being 
nothing less than treatises on moral anatomy and 
chemistry; studies of human nature in the elements 
of it. But I attach little weight to this function; 
they are hardly ever read with earnestness enough to 
permit them to fulfill it. The utmost they usually do 
is to enlarge somewhat the charity of a kind reader, 
or the bitterness of a malicious one; for each will 
gather, from the novel, food for her own disposition. 
Those who are naturally proud and envious will learn 
from Thackeray to despise humanity; those who are 



i30 



SESAME AND LILIES 



naturally gentle^ to pity it; those who are naturally 
shallow^ to laugh at it. So, also^ there might be a 
serviceable power in novels to bring before us^ in 
vividness^ a human truth which we had before dimly 
conceived; but the temptation to picturesqueness of 
statement is so great, that often the best writers of 
fiction cannot resist it; and our views are rendered 
so violent and one-sided^ that their vitality is rather 
a harm than good. 

78. Without^ however^ venturing here on any at- 
tempt at decision how much novel-reading should be 
allowed^ let us at least clearly assert this^ that whether 
novels, or poetry, or history be read, they should be 
chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their 
possession of good. The chance and scattered evil 
that may here and there haunt, or hide itself in, a 
powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl; 
but the emptiness of an author oppresses her, and 
his amiable folly degrades her. And if she can have 
access to a good library of old and classical books, 
there need be no choosing at all. Keep the modern 
magazine and novel out of your girl's way; turn her 
loose into the old librarv everv wet dav, and let her 
alone. She will find what is good for her; you can- 
not; for there is just this difference between the 
making of a girFs character and a boy^s — you may 
chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or ham- 
mer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you 
would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer 
a girl into an}i:hing. She grows as a flower does, — 
she will wither without sun; she will decay in her 



SESAME AND LILIES 131 

sheath, as a narcissus will, if you do not give her air 
enough; she may fall, and defile lier head in dust, if 
you leave her without help at some moments of her 
life; but you cannot fetter her; she must take her 
own fair form and way, if she take any, and in mind 
as in body, must have always 

''Her household motions light and free, 

And steps of virgin liberty. '' 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn 
in the field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times 
better than you ; and the good ones too, and will eat 
some bitter and prickly ones, good for it, which you 
had not the, slightest thought would have been so. 

79. Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, 
and let her practice in all accomplishments be ac- 
curate and thorough, so as to enable her to under- 
stand more than she accomplishes. I say the finest 
models — that is to say, the truest, simplest, usefullest. 
Note those epithets ; they will range through all the 
arts. Try them in music, where you might think 
them the least applicable. I say the truest, that in 
which the notes most closely and faithfully express 
the meaning of the words, or the character of in- 
tended emotion; again, the simplest, that in which 
the meaning and melody are attained with the few- 
est and most significant notes possible; and, finally, 
the usefullest, that music which makes the best words 
most beautiful, which enchants them in our memories 
each with its own glory of sound, and which applies 
them closest to the heart at the moment we need 
them. 



132 SESAME AND LILIES 

80. And not only in the material and in the 
course^ but yet more earnestly ^n the spirit of it, let 
a girFs education be as serious as a boy^s. You bring 
up your girls as if they were meant for sideboard 
ornaments, and then complain of their frivolity. Give 
them the same advantages that you give their brothers 
— appeal to the same grand instincts of virtue in 
them; teach them, also, that courage and trilth are 
the pillars of their being: — do you think that they 
would not answer that appeal, brave and true as they 
are even now, when you know that there is hardly a 
glrf s school in this Christian kingdom where the 
children's courage or sincerity would be thought of 
half so much importance as their way of coming in 
at a door; and when the whole system o^ society, as 
respects the mode of establishing them in life, is one 
rotten plague of cowardice and imposture — cowardice, 
in not daring to let them live, or love, except as their 
neighbors choose; and imposture, in bringing, for the 
purposes of our own pride, the full glow of the world^s 
worst vanity upon a girl's eyes, at the very period 
when the whole happiness of her future existence de- 
pends upon her remaining undazzled ? 

81. And give them, lastly, not only noble teach- 
ings, but noble teachers. You consider somewhat, be- 
fore you send your boy to school, what kind of man 
the master is ; — whatsoever kind of a man he is, you 
d,t least give him full authority over your son, and 
show some respect to him yourself: — if he comes to 
dine with you, you do not put him at a side table: 
you know also that, at college, your child's immediate 



SESAME AND LILIES 133 

tutor will be under the direction of some still higher 
tutor^ for whom you have absolute reverence. You 
do not treat the Dean of Christ Church or the Mas- 
ter of Trinity as your inferiors. 

But what teachers do you give your girls^ and what 
reverence do you show to the teachers you have 
chosen? Is a girl likely to think her own conduct, 
or her own intellect^ of much importance, when yon 
trust the entire formation of her character, moral 
and intellectual, to a person whom you let your 
servants treat with less respect than they do your 
housekeeper (as if the soul of your child were a less 
charge than jams and groceries), and whom you 
yourself think you confer an honor upon by letting 
her sometimes sit in the drawing-room in the even- 
ing? 

82. Thus, then, of literature as her help and thus 
of art. There is one more help which she cannot do 
without — one which, alone, has sometimes done more 
than all other influences besides, — the help of wild 
and fair nature. Hear this of the education of Joan 
of Arc: — 

''The education of this poor girl was mean, according to 
the present standard; was ineffably grand, according to a 
purer philosophical standard; and only not good for our 
age, because for us it would be unattainable. . . . 

''Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to 
the advantages of her situation. The fountain of Dom- 
r^my was on the brink of a boundless forest; and it was 
haunted to that degree by fairies, that the parish priest 
{cur6) was obliged to read mass there once' a year, in order 
to keep them in decent bounds. . ^ • 



134 SESAME AND LILIES 

''But the forests of Domremy — those were the glories 
of the land; for in them abode mysterious powers and an- 
cient secrets that towered into tragic strength. 'Abbeys 
there were, and abbey windows,' — like Moorish temples of 
the Hindoos,' — that exercised even princely power both in 
Touraine and in the German Diets. These had their sweet 
bells that pierced the forests for many a league at matins or 
vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, 
and scattered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no degree 
to disturb the deep solitude of the region; yet many enough 
to spread a network or awning of Christian sanctity over 
what else might have seemed a heathen wilderness. ' ' * 

Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in Eng- 
land, woods eighteen miles deep to the centre; but 
you can, perhaps, keep a fairy or two for your chil- 
dren yet, if you wish to keep them. But do you wish 
it? Suppose you had each, at the back of your 
houses, a garden^ large enough for your children to 
play in, with just as much lawn as would give them 
room to run, — no more, — and that you could not 
change your abode ; but that, if you chose, you could 
double your income, or quadruple it, by digging a 
coal shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the 
flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would you do it ? I 
hope not. I can tell you, you would be wrong if you 
did, though it gave you income sixty-fold instead of 
four-fold. 

83. Yet this is what you are doing with all Eng- 
land. The whole country is but a little garden, not 
more than enough for your children to run on the 

* ^ ^ Joan of Arc : in reference to M. Michelet ^s History of 
France, ^ ' — Thomas De Quincey. 



SESAME AND LILIES 135 

lawns of^ if you would let them all run there. And 
this little garden you will turn into furnace ground, 
and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can; and those 
children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For 
the fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies 
of the furnace as of the wood, and their first gifts 
seem to be "sharp arrows of the mighty ;^^ but their 
last gifts are "coals of juniper.^^ 

84. And yet T cannot — though there is no part of 
my subject that I feel more — press this upon you; 
for we made so little use of the power of nature while 
we had it that we shall hardly feel what we have lost. 
Just on the other side of the Mersey you have your 
Snowdon, and your Menai Straits, and that mighty 
granite rock beyond the moors of Anglesea, splendid 
in its heathery crest, and foot planted in the deep 
sea, once thought of as sacred — a divine promontory, 
looking westward ; the Holy Head or Headland, still 
not without awe when its red light glares first 
through storm. These are the hills, and these the 
bays and blue inlets, which, among the Greeks, would 
have been always loved, always fateful in influence 
on the national mind. That Snowdon is your Par- 
nassus; but where are its Muses? That Holyhead 
mountain is your Island of Aegina; but where is its 
Temple to Minerva? 

85. Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva 
had achieved under the shadow of our Parnassus up 
to the year 1848? — Here is a little account of a 
Welsh school, from page 261 of the Report on Wales, 
published by the Committee of Council on Educa- 



136 SESAME AND LILIES 



ninor ^™ 



tion. This is a school close to a town containing 
5000 persons: — 

^ ^ I then called up a larger class, most of whom had re- ^hI 
centlj come to the school.. Three girls repeatedly declared 
they had never heard of Christ, and two that they had 
never heard of God. Two out of six thought Christ was 
on earth now^' (they might have had a worse thought, per- 
haps), ^^ three knew nothing about the Crucifixion. Four out 
of seven did not know the,, names of the months nor the num- 
ber of days in a yekr. They had no notion of addition, 
beyond two and two, or three and three; their minds were 
perfect blanks.'' 

OH^ ye women of England ! from the Princess of 
that Wales to the simplest of you^ do not think your 
own children can be brought into their true fold of 
rest^ while these are scattered on the hills, as sheep 
having no shepherd. And do not think your daugh- 
ters can be trained to the truth of their own human 
beauty, while the pleasant places, which God made 
at once for their school-room and their play-ground, 
lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize them 
rightly in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you 
baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great 
Lawgiver strikes forth forever from the rocks of 
your native land — waters which a Pagan would have 
worshipped in their purity, and you worship only 
with pollution. You cannot lead your children faith- 
fully to those narrow axe-hewn church altars of yours, 
while the dark azure altars in heaven — the moun- 
tains that sustain your island throne — mountains on 
which a Pagan would have seen the powers of heaven 
rest in every wreathed cloud — remain for you with- 



SESAME AND LILIES 137 

out inscription; altars built, not to, but by, an Un- 
known God. 

86. III. Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far 
of the teaching, of woman, and thus of her house- 
hold office, and queenliness. We come now to our 
last, our widest question, — What is her queenly office 
with respect to the state? 

Generally, we are under an impression that' a man's 
duties are public, and a woman's private. But this 
is not altogether so. A man has a personal work or 
duty, relating to his own home, and a public work or 
duty, which is the expansion of the other, relating 
to the state. So a woman has a personal work or 
duty, relating to her own home, and a public work or 
duty, which is also the expansion of that. 

]S"ow, the man's work for his own home is, as has 
been said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and 
defence; the woman's to secure its order, comfort, 
and loveliness. 

Expand both these functions. The man's duty, as 
a member of a commonwealth, is to assist in^ the 
maintenance, in the advance, in the defence of the 
state. The woman's duty, as a member of the com- 
monwealth, is to assist in the ordering, in the com- 
forting, and in the beautiful adornment of the state. 

What the man is at his own gate, defending it, if 
need be, against insuft and spoil, that also, not in a 
less, but in a more devoted measure, he is to be at 
the gate of his country, leaving his home, if need be, 
even to the spoiler, to do his more incumbent work 
there. 



138 SESAME AND LILIES 

And, in like manner^ what the woman is to be 
within her gates^ as the centre of order^ the balm of 
distress, and the mirror of beauty: that she is also 
to be without her gates, where order is more difBcnlt, 
distress more imminent, loveliness more rare. 

And as within the human heart there is always set 
an instinct for all its real duties, — an instinct which 
you cannot quench, but only warp and corrupt if you 
withdraw it from its true purpose: — as there is the 
intense instinct of love, which, rightly disciplined, 
maintains all the sanctities of life, and, misdirected, 
undermines them, and must do either the one or the 
other; — so there is in the human heart an inex- 
tinguishable instinct, the love of power, which, 
rightly directed, maintains all the majesty of law and 
life, and, misdirected, wrecks them. 

87. Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart 
of man, and of the heart of woman, God set'it there, 
and God keeps it there. Vainly, as falsely, you 
blame or rebuke the desire of power ! — For Heaven's 
sake, and for Man's sake, desire it all you can. But 
what power? That is all the question. Power to 
destroy? the lion's limb, and the dragon's breath? 
Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide, and to 
guard. Power of. the sceptre and shield; the power 
^of the royal hand that heals in touching, — that binds 
the fiend, and looses the captive; the throne that is 
founded on the rock of Justice, and descended from 
only by steps of Mercy. Will you not covet such 
power as this, and seek such throne as this, and be no 
more housewives, bfit queens? 



SESAME AND LILIES 139 

88. It is now long since the women of England 
arrogated;, universally, a title which once belonged to 
nobility only; and having once been in the habit of 
accepting the. simple title of gentlewoman, as corre- 
spondent to that of gentleman, insisted on the 
privilege of assuming the title of "Lady/^^ which 
properly corresponds only to the title of "Lord/' 

I do not blame them for this; but only for their 
narrow motive in this. I would have them desire and 
claim the title of Lady, provided they claim, not 
merely the title, but the office and duty signified by 
it. Lady means "bread-giver^^ or "loaf-giver,^' and 
Lord means "maintainer of laws,'' and both titles 
have reference, not to the law which is maintained in 
the house, nor to the bread which is given to the 
household ; but to law maintained for the multitude, 
and to bread broken among the multitude. So that a 
Lord has legal claim only to his title in so far as he 
is the maintainor of the justice of the Lord of Lords ; 
and a Lady has legal claim to her title, only so far 
as she communicates that help to the poor repre- 
sentatives of her Master, which women once, minis- 

* I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted for 
our English youth of certain ranks, in which both boy and 
girl should receive, at a given age, their knighthood and 
ladyhood by true title; attainable 'only by certain probation 
and trial both of character and accomplishment; and to be 
forfeited, on conviction, by their peers, of any dishonorable 
act. Such an institution would be entirely, and with all 
noble results, possible, in a nation which loved honor. That 
it would not be possible among us, is not to the discredit of 
the scheme. 



140 SESAME AND LILIES 

tering to Him of their substance, were permitted to 
extend to that Master Himself; and when she is 
known, as He Himself once was, in breaking of 
bread. 

89. And this beneficent and legal dominion, this 
power of the Dominus, or House-Lord, and of the 
Domina, or House-Lady, is great and venerable, not 
in the number of those through whom it has lineally 
descended, but in the number of those whom it grasps 
within its sway; it is always regarded with reverent 
worship wherever its dynasty is founded on its duty, 
and its ambition correlative with its beneficence. Your 
fancy is pleased with the thought of being noble 
ladies, with a train of vassals? Be it so; you can- 
not be too noble, and your train cannot be too great ; 
but see to it that your train is of vassals whom you 
serve and feed, not merely of slaves who serve and 
feed you; and that the multitude which obeys you 
is of those whom you have comforted, not oppressed, 
— whom you have redeemed, not led into captivity. 

90. And this, which is true of the lower or house- 
hold dominion, is equally true of the queenly domin- 
ion ; — that highest dignity is open to you, if you will 
also accept that highest duty. Eex et Eegina — Eoi 
et Eeine — ''Right-doers f they differ but from the 
Lady and Lord, in that their power is supreme over 
the mind as over the person — that they not only feed 
and clothe, but direct and teach. And whether con- 
sciously or not, you must be, in many a heart, en- 
throned : there is no putting by that crown ; queens 
you must always be; queens to your lovers; queens 



SESAME AND LILIES 141 

to your husbands and your sons; queens of higher 
mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and 
will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the 
stainless sceptre of womanhood. ' But, alas ! you are 
too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty 
in the least things, while you abdicate it in the great- 
est; and leaving misrule and violence to work their 
will among men, in defiance of the power which, 
holding straight in gift from the Prince of all Peace, 
the wicked among you betray, and the good forget. 
91. "Prince of Peace.^^ Note that name. When 
kings rule in that name, and nobles, and the judges 
of the earth, they also, in their narrow place, and 
mortal measure, receive the power of it. There are 
no other rulfers than they: other rule than theirs is 
but misrule; they who govern verily "Dei gratia" 
are all princes, yes, or princesses, of Peace. There is 
not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you 
women are answerable for it.; not in that you have 
provoked, but- in that you have not hindered. Men, 
by their nature, are prone to fight ; they will fight for 
any cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their 
cause for them, and to forbid them when there is no 
cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery 
in the earth, but the guilt of it lies with you. Men 
can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to 
bear it. Men may tread it down without sympathy 
in their own struggle; but men are feeble in sym- 
pathy, and contracted in hope; it is you only who 
can feel the depths of pain, and conceive the way of 
its healing. Instead of trying to do this, you turn 



142 SESAME AND LILIES 

away from it; you shut yourselves within your park 
walls and garden gates ; and you are content to know 
that there is bevond them a whole world in wilder- 
ness — a world of secrets which you dare not pene- 
trate^ and of suffering which you dare not conceive. 

92. I tell you that this is to me quite the most 
amazing afaong the phenomena of humanity. I am 
surprised at no depths to which, when once warped 
from its honor^ that humai^ity can be degraded. I do 
not wonder at the misers death, with his hands, as 
they relax, dropping gold. I do not wonder at the 
sensualisf s life, with the shroud wrapped about his 
feet. I do not wonder at the single-handed murder 
oi a single victim, done by the assassin in the dark- 
ness of the railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I 
do not even wonder at the m3Tiad-handed murder of 
multitudes, done boastfully in the daylight, by the 
frenzy of nations, and the immeasurable, unimagin- 
able guilt, heaped up from hell to heaven, of their 
priests and kings. But this is wonderful to me — 
oh, how wonderful ! — to see the tender and delicate 
woman among you, with her child at her breast, and 
a power, if she would wield it, over it, and over its 
father, purer than the air of heaven, and stronger 
than the seas of earth — nay a magnitude of blessing 
which her husband would not part with for all that 
earth itself, though it were made of one entire and 
perfect chrysolite: — to see her abdicate this majesty 
to play at precedence with her next-door neighbor ! 
This is wonderful — oh, wonderful ! — to see her, with 
every innocent feeling fresh within her, go out in the 



SESAME AND LILIES 143 

morning into her garden to play with the fringes ,of 
its guarded flowers, and lift their heads when they 
are drooping, with her happy smile upon her face, 
and no cloud upon her brow, because there is a little 
wall around her place of peace ; and yet she knows, 
in her heart, if she would only look for its knowledge, 
that, outside of that little rose-covered wall, the wild- 
grass, to the horizon, is torn up by tlie agony of men, 
and beat level by the drift of their life-blood. 

93. Have you ever considered what a deep under- 
meaning there lies, or at least may be read, if we 
choose, in our custom of strewing flowers before those 
whom we think most happy? Do you suppose it is 
merely to deceive them into the hope that happiness 
is always to fall thus in showers at their feet? — tliat 
wherever they pass they will tread on herbs of sweet 
scent, and that the rough ground will be made smooth 
for them by depth of roses ! So surely as they be- 
lieve that, they will have, instead, to walk on bitter 
herbs and thorns; and the only softness to their feet 
will be of snow. But it is not thus intended they 
should believe ; there is a better meaning in that old 
custom. The path of a good woman is indeed strewn 
with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not 
before them. ^^Her feet have touched the meadows, 
and left the daisies rosy.^^ 

94. You think that only a lover's fancy; — false 
and vain ? How if it could be true ? You think this 
also, perhaps, only a poet's fancy — 

*'Even the light harebell raised its head 
Elastic from her airy tread. ' ' 



144 SESAME AND LILIES 

But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does 
not destroy where she passes. She should revive; 
the harebells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. 
You think I am rushing into wild hyperbole? Par- 
don me, not a whit — I mean what I say in calm 
English, spoken in resolute truth. You have heard 
it said — (and I believe there is more than fancy even 
in that sa}^ing, but let it pass for a fanciful one) — 
that flowers only flourish rightly in the garden of 
some one who loves them. I know you would like 
that to be true ; you would think it a pleasant magic 
if you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom 
by a kind look upon them: nay, more, if your look 
had the power, not only to cheer, but to guard; — ^if 
you could bid the black blight turn away, and the 
knotted caterpillar spare — if you could bid the dew 
fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south 
wind, in frost — "Come, thou south, and breathe upon 
my garden, that the spices of it may flow out." This 
j'ou would think a great thing ? And do you think it 
not a greater thing, that all this (and how much 
more than this!) 5^ou can do, for fairer flowers than 
these — flowers that could bless you for having blessed 
them, and will love you for having loved them; — 
flowers that have thoughts like yours, and lives like 
yours ; and which, once saved, you save forever ? Is 
this only a little power? Far among the moorlands 
and the rocks, — far in the darkness of the terrible 
streets, — these feeble florets are lying, with all their 
fresh leaves torn, and their stems broken — will you 
never go down to them, nor set them in order in their 



SESAME AND LI1.IES 145 

little fragrant beds, nor fence them, in their trem- 
bling, from the fierce wind? Shall morning follow 
morning, for 3^ou, but not for them; and -the dawn 
rise to watch, far away, those frantic Dances of 
Death ;^ but no dawn rise to breathe upon these liv- 
ing banks of wild violet, and woodbine, and rose ; nor 
call to you, through your casement, — call (not giving 
you the name of the English poet's lady, but the 
name of Dante's great Matilda, who on the edge of 
happy Lethe, stood, wreathing flowers with flowers), 
saying,— 

' ' Come into the garden, Maud, > 

For the black bat, night, has flown. 
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad 
And the musk of the roses blown * ' ? 

Will you not go down among them ? — among those 
sweet living things, whose new courage, sprung from 
the earth with the deep color of heaven upon it, is 
starting up in strength of goodly spire; and whose 
purity, washed from the dust, is opening, bud by bud, 
into the flower of promise; — and still they turn to 
you and for you, "The Larkspur listens — I hear, I 
hear ! And the Lily whispers — I wait/' 

95. Did you notice that I missed two lines when 
I read you that first stanza; and think that I had 
forgotten them? Hear them now: — 

*'Come into the garden, Maud, 

For the black bat, night, has flown. 

Come into the garden, Maud, 

I am here at the gate alone.'' 

^ See note, p. 86. 



146 SESAME AND LILIES 

:Wlio is it^ think you, who stands at the gate of 
this sweeter garden, alone, waiting for you? Did 
you ever hear, not of a Maud, but a Madeleine, who 
went down to her garden in the dawn, and found One 
waiting at the gate, whom she supposed to be the 
gardener? Have you not sought Him often; sought 
Him in vain, all through the night; sought Him in 
vain at the gate of that old garden where the fiery 
sword is set? He is never there; but at the gate of 
thi^ garden He is waiting always — waiting to take 
your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of the 
valley, to see whether the vine has flourished, and the 
pomegranate budded. There you shall see with Him 
the little tendrils of the vines that His hand is 
guiding — there you shall see the pomegranate 
springing where His hand cast the sanguine seed; — 
more: you shall see the troops of the angel keepers 
that, with their wings, wave away the hungry birds 
from the pathsides where He has sown, and call to 
each other between the vineyard rows, "Take us the 
foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines, for* our 
vines have tender grapes.'^ Oh — you queens — you 
queens ! among the hills and happy greenwood of 
this land of yours, shall the foxes have holes and 
the birds of the air have nests; and in your cities 
shall the stones cry out against you, that they are 
the only pillows where the Son of Man can lay His 
head? 



NOTES 

''Sesame and Lilies" is an illustration of Ruskin* usual whimsi« 
raiity in selecting titles. Fors Clavigera, for instance, is an almost 
untranslatable Latin pun; Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds 
is a treatise on the unification of the church; The Eagle's Nest is 
a collection of lectures on metaphysics, and Love's Meinie a dis- 
cussion of Greek and English birds. Ruskin's message was so single 
and consistent that his various titles meant little to him. Says 
Frederick Harrison: "I remember hearing Ruskin give a lecture . . . 
?vhich had been announced with the title of 'Crystallography.' He 
opened by telling us that he was really about to lecture on ' Cistercian 
Architecture,' nor did it matter what the title was. 'For,' said he, 
' if I had begun to speak about Cistercian Abbeys, I should have been 
sure to get on Crystals presently; and if I had begun upon Crystals, I 
should soon have drifted into Architecture I' " The last sentence of 
the first lecture throws some light on the first word of the present title; 
and for the other, the comparison of a young girl to a lily is a well- 
known one. The meaning of the sub-title is plain. 

Page 41, IT 1- slight mask. Is the mask really thrown off here? 

42, 2. somie connection with schools. "His father's charity 
had made him life-governor of various institutions and schools" (Col- 
lingwood). At the time of this lecture, moreover, Ruskin was teach- 
ing drawing in the Workingmen's College. 

42, 2. double-belled doors. Fashionable houses in England 
have one bell for business callers and another for visitors. 

43, 3. the last infirmity. Milton^ Lycidas, II, 70-72. (Slightly 
misquoted here.) 

44, 4. mortal. Lat. mortalis, from mors, death; literally, deadly. 

44, 4. My Lord. Most of the bishops of the Church of England 
are members of the House of I^ords. 

45, 5. my writings on Political Economy. In 1864 Ruskin 
had already published, on this subject, The Political Economy o] 
Art, Unto this Last, and Munera Pulveris. 

45, Note. — Queen of the Air, §106, reads in part as follows. " First 
.of the foundation of art in moral character. . . . A good man is not 
necessarily a painter, nor does an eye for color imply an honest mind. 
But great art implies the union of both powers; it is the expression, 
by an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is not there, we c^n have 
no art at all; and if the soul — and a right soul, too — is not there, the 
art is bad, however dexterous." And §102 of the same work say." 

147 



148 NOTES 

further: "A man may hide himself to you, every other way; but he 
cannot in his work; there, be sure, you have him to the inmost. All 
that he likes, all that he sees, — all that he can do, — his imagination, 
his affections, his perseverance, his impatience, his clumsiness, clever- 
ness, everything is there. If the work is a cobweb, you know it was 
made by a spider; if a honeycomb, by a bee; a worm-cast is thrown up 
by a worm, and a nest wreathed by a bird; and a house built by a 
man, v/orthily, if he is worthy, and ignobly, if he is ignoble. 

**And always, from the least to the greatest, as the made thing is 
good or bad, so is the maker of it." 

These paragraphs contain the gist of all Ruskin's art teaching, this is 
his message of art to the world. For a discussion of its soundness, see 
F. Harrison's John Ruskin, pp. 65, 66. See also Browneil, Victorian 
Prose MaMers. 

52, 11. inherent aristocracy. Aristocracy is used here in its 
literal meaning, — the rule of the best. 

52, 12. Elysian gates. In the Elysian fields, according to the 
Greek conception, dwelt the happy souls of dead heroes and wise men. 

52, 12. portieres. Here means gates. 

52, 12. Faubourg St. Germain. One of the aristocratic quar- 
ters of old Paris. 

53, 13. that cruel reticence. This is an old doctrine of Rus- 
kin's, set forth in various books. On the other hand, Habakkuk was 
ordered by the Lord to write so that **he who ran might read it." 

55, 14, patientest. Note the fo^m. Cf. "fatalest," further on; 
also "crimsonest." used often in- Modern Painters. Ruskin was 
almost as fond as Carlyle of coining new v,ords, but very few of their 
coinages have any circulation in the language. 

55, 15. literature. Look up the derivation of the word for an 
understanding of this passage. 

55, 15- pronounces. For a contrary view, see T. H. Louns- 
bury's "Standard of Pronunciation in English," portions of which 
appeared in Harper's, Sept. and Nov., 1903. 

55, 15. canaille. Fr.; common people, rascals. 

56, 15. noblesse. Fr. ; nobility. 

56, 16. false Latin quantity. English education is based on 
the classics to a far greater extent than is education in America. 
In our House of Representatives a false quantity would excite noth- 
ing but a yawn. 

56, 16. masked words. Words capable of more than one inter- 
pretation. 

57, 16. chameleon . . . "ground-lion." This is another of 
Ruskin's complicated puns. Chameleon is derived from the Gr. 
XttM-at — on the ground, and Aeu>f — lion. But the accepted English 
idea of the cha?meleon is an animal which changes color in different 
environments. These two ideas the Greek and the English, Ruskin 
here unites. 



NOTES 14:^ 



57, 16. unjust stewards. Luke xvi, 1-5, q. v. 

57, 17. mongrel in breed. Cf. par. 19, second sentence. 

58, 17. heavens were of old. II Peter, iii, 5-7. 

53, 17. sown on any wayside. Read the parable of the sower, 
Matt, xiii, 3-8. 

58, 18. damno and condemn. The obvious inference here, that 
it is wrong to translate a foreign word by different English words, 
in different contexts, is not altogether sound. Such verbs, for in- 
stance, as Gr. yiyvofxai or Lat. ago cannot always be translated by the 
same English word. 

59, 18. divisions in the mind of Europe. This refers to the 
struggles of the Reformation, and smaller religious wars. 

50, 19. Greek first, etc. One such word is Gr. ©Tjo-avpo?, Lat. 
thesaurum. Old Fr. tresor, Eng. treasure. See Greenough and Kit-. 
tvedge's Words and Their Ways, Chap. 10 (The Macmillan Co.), for 
other examples. 

60, 19. Max Muller. A celebrated German philologian (1823- 
1900) almost exactly contemporary with Ruskin; professor at Oxford. 
The work referred to is Lectures on the Science of Language (1861-64). 

60, 20. Lycidas. To get the background of this passage the 
student must read Lycidas as a whole. 

61, 20. no bishop-lover. Milton was a Puritan. How did the 
Puritans regard bishops? 

61, 20. the power of the keys. Matt, xvi, 19; a biblical passage 
constantly quoted in ecclesiastical documents of the Middle Ages as 
authority for the papacy's claim to universal power. 

63, 21. ** lords over the heritage" : "ensamples to the flock.** 
I Pet. V, 3. ensaraples = examples. 

63, 22. broken metaphor. Mixed meta^phor; metaphor in 
whicli the figures conflict. Cf. Hamlet — " to take arms against a 
sea of troubles.'* 

63, 22. bishop and pastor. Bishop from Gr. eTriV/coTro?, lit- 
erally an overseer. Pastor from I>at. pastor, literally shepherd. 
(What is the effect of the paragraphing here?) 

64, 22. Bill and Nancy. May refer to Bill Sykes and Nancy in 
Oliver Twist. Ruskin was fond of Dickens — much fonder than of 
either Thackeray or George Eliot, the two ether great novelists of 
the time. 

64, 22. Salisbury steeple. Called the highest in England. 

65, N-OTE. — Time and Tide, Utters of Ruskin's to a workingman, 
on the Laws of Work (1867). In the thirteenth letter occurs the 
following: 

" Over every hundred (or some not much greater number) of the 
families composing a Christian State, there should be appointed an 
overseer, or bishop, to render account, to the state, of the life of everv 
individual in tho^e families; and to have care both of their interest 
and conduct . . . so that it may bo impossible tor anv p.mm)ii, how- 



150 NOTEb 

ever humble, to suffer from unknown want, or live in unrecognized 
crimes." 

65, 23. Spirit. From Lat. spiritus. The Greek word referred 
to here is nvevfj-a, breath, wind. 

65, 23. the wind bloweth. John iii, 8. 

66, 23. **puflang up." Ruskin had a particular dislike for sec- 
tarian conceit. Cf. the following extract from a letter to Charles 
Eliot Norton: **I went away to a Waldensian chapel, where a little 
squeaking idiot was preaching to an audience of seventeen old women 
and three louts that they were the only children of God in Turin; 
and that all the people in Turin outside the chapel and all the people 
in the world ©ut of sight of Monte Viso would be damned." 

66, 23. cretinous. Cretins are a kind of idiot especially com- 
mon in parts of Switzerland. 

66, 23. clouds Without water. Jude 12. 

66, 24. Dante. (1265-1321.) The great ItaUan poet of the 
Middle Ages. 

66, 24.' both the keys. "Thither we came to the first great 
stair; it was of white marble so polished and smooth that I mirrored 
myself in it as I appeared. The second of deeper hue than perse [dark 
blue], was of a rough and scorched stone, cracked lengthwise and 
athwart. The third which above lies massy, seemed to me of por- 
phyry as flaming red as blood that spurts forth from a vein. Upon 
this the angel of God held both his feet, seated upon the threshold 
that seemed to me stone of adamant. . . . From beneath that [vest- 
ment] he drew two keys. One was of gold and the other was of 
silver; first with the white and then with the yellow he so did to the 
door, that I was content." (Purgatory, Canto IX, Norton's trans- 
lation.) 

"The lowest stair was marble white, so smooth 
And polished, that therein my mirror'd form 
Distinct I saw. The next of hue more dark 
Than sablest grain, a rough and singed block 
Cracked lengthwise and across. The third, that lay 
Massy above, seemed porphyry, that flamed 
Red as the lifeblood spouting from a vein. 
On this God's angel either foot sustained. 
Upon the threshold seated, which appear'd 
A rock of diamond. ... 

From underneath that vestment forth he drew 
Two keys, of metal twain: the one was gold, 
Its fellow silver. With the pallid first. 
And next the burnished, he so plj^'d the gate 
As to content me well." (Gary's translation.) 
The explanations of this passage are varied. Professor Norton 
interprets it thus: "The first step is the symbol of confession, the 
second of contrition, the third of satisfaction: the threshold of ada- 



NOTES 151 

mant (or diamond) may perhaps signify the authority of the church. 
Tt)t golden key is typical of the power to open, and the silver of the 
knowledge to whom to open." 

67, 24. have taken away the key. Luke xi, 52. 

67, 24. He that watereth. Proverbs xi, 25. 

67. 24. rock-apostle. Peter; from Gr. nerpo^ a rock. Cf. 
Matt, xvi, 18. 

67, 24. Take him and bind him. Matt, xxii, 13. 

68, 25. You will begin to perceive, etc. Much of what 
Ruskin says here is profoundly true, but it is uttered tactlessly and 
with an apparent self-assurance that repels. Ruskin kept this kind 
of phraseology for his writing ; in personal intercourse he was modest 
to a fault, wholly generous and tolerant of the opinions of everybody. 

68, 25. a ditch to cleanse. Cf. the story of Ruskin's road- 
mending near Oxford. But unfortunately he had only an "opinion" 
then about road-mending, and the job was badly done. There is a 
legend that Mr. Andrew Lang, at that time an Oxford student, rode 
to the scene of his labor with his pick in a hansom. 

69, 25. "to mix the music ..." From Emerson's To Rhea, 
When a god loves a mortal child, 

*'He mixes music with her thoughts, 
And saddens her with heavenly doubts." 

69. 25. This writer. Milton. 

70, 25. the scene with the bishops. Ruskin's meaning is, 
have you ever contrasted the character of the hypocritical and feeble 

■ bishops in this scene with the character of such a right-meaning 
bishop as Cranmer? The "scene" referred to occurs in Richard III, 
Act iii, Sc. 7, q. v. 

70, 25. description of St. Francis and St. Dominic. Dante 
praises them highly in the Paradiso, Cantos XI, XIL 

70, 25. him who made Virgil wonder. Virgil was Dante's 
guide through the Inferno. "Him" was Caiaphas, high priest of the 
Jews, who condemned Christ. The translation of the Italian is 
"Abjectly extended ... in banishment eternal." (Cary.) 

70, 25. him whom Dante stood beside. Pope Nicholas III, 
whom Dante pictures in Hell head downwards in a fiery pit, with only 
his feet protruding. Dante stands "like the friar that doth shrive a 
wretch for murder doomed." (Cary.) 

70, 25. articles. Definite declarations of faith. Cf. the Thirty- 
Nine Articles of the English Church. 

70, 26. Break up. Jeremiah iv. 3. 

71, 27. Passion or ^'sensation." Ruskin uses both as syn- 
onyms for "feeling." 

71, 28. vulgarity. From Lat. vulgaris, meaning primarily com- 
mon, of the multitude. 

72, 28. "tact." From Lat. tangere, to touch. 

72, 28. Mimosa. Mimosa sensitiva, the sensitive-plant. 



152 NOTES 

72, 29. As the true knowledge. Note the careful balance here. 

73, 29. the Biver of Life. Revelation xxii, 1. 

73, 29. the angels desire. I Peter i, 12. ♦ 

73, 29. the life of an agonized nation. This may refer to the 
attitude of England toward the American Civil War, then going on. 
Ruskin's feeling of the wickedness of that conflict was so strong that 
while it was in progress he refused to write to hte friend Charles 
EUot Norton, saying, "I could no otherwise than by silence express 
the intensity of my adverse feelings to the things you were coun- 
tenancing." For light on Ruskin's view of slavery, cf. the paragraph 
quoted on p. 20 of the Introduction. He felt that slavery was bad, 
but that there were other worse evils. 

73, 29. noble nations murdered. This was the period of the 
struggle of Poland against Russia, of the attempt of Garibaldi for 
freedom in Italy, and of the Dano- Prussian war, in none of which 
would the English government consent to interfere. 

74, 30. weighing evidence. This undoubtedly refers to a crime 
of the particular winter (1864) in which these lectures were deUvered. 
But illustrations of Ruskin's point are as commion as newspapers. 

74, 30. its own children. A reference to the Civil War, which 
of course greatly affected the cotton market, forcing many of the 
English mills to close for lack of raw material. 

74, 30. stealing six walnuts. Cf. in Victor Hugo's Les Miser- 
ables Jean Valjean's punishment cf two years in the galleys for steal- 
ing a loaf of bread. 

74, 30. selling opium. The Opium War of 1839-40, between 
England and China, is one of the blackest blots on modern Enghsh 
history. The emperor of China, seeing the destruction which opium 
was bringing upon his subjects, forbade its importation; but as this 
interfered with the business of English planters in India, the English 
government forced him after a brief resistance to rescind his decree. 

75,30. "perplexed i* the extreme." From Othello's dying 
speech : 

*'Then you must speak 
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; 
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought 
Perplexed i' the extreme." (Othello, Act V, Sc. 2.) 

75, 30. bayoneting young girls. Cf. in our own day the 
Armenian atrocities of 1903-4. 

75, 30. love of money. I Tim. vi, 10. 

75, 30. declaring, etc. See Introduction, on Ruskin's theories 
of social ethics. The opposition which these theories had ^aroused 
surprised and saddened him. 

76, 31. good Samaritan. Luke x, 30-35. Read^ the whole 
parable. 

77, 31. scorpion whips. II Chronicles x, 11. Whips barbed 
with iron points. 



NOTES 153 

77, 31. a money-making mob. Ruskin's hatred of avarice is 
made sufficiently evident here. He practised what he preached, 
tnoreover. 

77, 32. bibliomaniac. Cf. par, 18 for derivation. 

78, 32. bared their backs. "When Southey, in 1805, went to 
see Sir Walter Scott, it occurred to him in Edinburgh that having 
had neither new coaA nor hat since little Edith was born, he must 
surely be in want of both: and here, in the metropolis of the North, 
was an opportunity of arraying himself to his desire. 'Howbeit,' he 
says, 'en considering the really respectable appearance which my old 
ones made, for a traveller, — and considering, moreover, that as learn- 
in ;: v.-j;s better than house or land, it certainly must be better than 
fine clothes, — I laid out all my money in books, and came home to 
wear out my old clothes in the winter.' " (English Men of Letters, 
Southey, p. 101. Quoted by Miss A. S. Cook, in her edition of 
Sesame and Lilies. 

78, 32. munching and sparkling. Note the effective choice of 
words. 

78, 32. sweet as honey. Possibly rem*iniscent of Rev. x, 9, 10; 
although the meaning of the verse would not fit Ruskin's preachment. 

78, 32. multipliable barley -loaves. Matt, xiv, q. v. 

78, 32. circulating libraries. Ruskin does not seem to agree 
with the belief that circulating libraries aie the foundation of popular 
education. But he is perhaps referring to circulating libraries of fic- 
tion only. 

79, 33. Observatory. At Greenwich, from which we in America 
reckon longitude. 

79, 33. British Museum. In many ways the most notable 
museum in the world. 

79, 33. anybody will pay, etc. Why Ruskin allowed the gram- 
matical error in this sentence to stand through various editions, has 
never been explained. 

79, 33. resolve another nebula. Break up star-mist, such as 
that of the Milky Way, into individual stars. 

79, 33. a portion for foxes. A play upon Psalms Ixiii, 10. 

80, 33. one, unique, etc. It was "a fossil of the archaeopteryx 
... a genus . . . combining some characteristics of a lizard with 
some of a bird." (Century Diet.) 

80, 33. Professor Owen. Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892). See 
any biographical dictionary. 

81, 34. Ludgate apprentices. I udgate Hill, a street of small 
shops leading west from St. Paul's Cathedral. It is often referud to 
in the works of the Elizabethan dramatists. 

83, 35. Schaffhausen. For Schaffhausen, in Switzerland. Ruskin 
had a peculiar affection. It was there he caught his first glimj^se ol 
one of the great passions of his life, the Alps. "Infinitely beyond all 
that we had ever thought or dreamed - the seen walls of lost Eden 



154 . NOTES 

could not have be^n more beautiful to us; not more awful, round 
heaven, the walls of sacred Death. ... To that terrace, and to the 
Lake of Geneva, my heart and faith return to this day in every 
impulse that is yet nobly alive in them, and every thought that has 
in it help or peace." (Praeterita.) 

83, 35. Tell's chapel. On the Swiss Lake Lucerne. 

83, 35. the Clarens shore. Where stands the Castle of Chillon, 

83,35. "bellowing fire. Cf. Fors Clavigera,Y: "You enterprised 
a Railroad — j^ou blasted . . . rocks away, heaped thousands of tons 
of shale into [the] lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the God 
with it; and now every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an 
hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton ; which you think a lucra- 
tive process of exchange — you Fools Everywhere." In this connec- 
tion note Collingwood, Life, vol. II, p. 459: "Mr. Ruskin's dislike of 
railways has been the text of a great deal of misrepresentation. As a 
matter of fact, he never objected to main lines of railway communi- 
cation; but he strongly objected, in common with a vast number of 
people, to the introduction of railways into districts whose chief 
interest is in their scenery." 

83, 35. soaped poles. Cf. the "greased poles" at country fairs. 

83, 35. firing howitzers. To hear the echoes. 

84, 35. "towers of the vineyards.** Cf. Isaiah v, 2. 

84, Note. — Cf. the work of the Consumers' League in America 
at the present time. Many of Ruskin's "impractical" suggestions 
nave thus borne fruit. 

86, 36. get the ** stones.** Be put to breaking stones bn the 
roads. The "certain passage" referred to in the note is Matt, vii, 9, q.v. 

87, Note. — chaine diabolique. Devil's chain. 
87, Note. — cancan d*enfer. Dance of Hell. 

87, Note. — Morning service. Tlie meaning is, compare this with 
the idea of "morning service" in the hues quoted. (The lines are 
from Lycidas, slightly misrendered.) 

88, 37. takes a pension from Government. Is there any 
flaw in Ruskin's argument? 

89, Note.— bread of affliction, etc. I Kings, xxii, 27. 

89, Note.— Ye fast for strife. Cf. Isaiah, Iviii, 4. 

90, 37. Satanellas, — Roberts, — Fausts. Light operas of the 
day, in which the devil appears as a character. 

90, 37. "Dio.** Italian for God; used in these "mimicked 
prayers,'* 

91, 37. carburetted hydrogen ghost. Editors differ about 
Ruskin's meaning here, but it seems plain enough. Carburetted 
hydrogen is illuminating gas, and he has already referred to "gas- 
inspired" Christianity. Let the ghost of this false Christ iar it y pass 
away, and let us return to the sound and true Christianity which 
would help the beggar at the doorstep. For the story of Lazarus, 
see Luke xvi. / 



NOTES 155 

91, 37. a true Church, etc. 

"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed, 
In whatso we share with another's need.' 

— (Lowell, Vision of Sir Lauvfal, Part VIII.) 

92. 39. their amusement grows out of their work. The 
•'Arts and Crafts" movement of the present day is another helpful 
influence we owe in large part to Ruskin. A worxman engaged, not 
in turning out endless chair-arms by machinery and all alike, but in 
making the entire chair with his own hands, finds pleasure in produc- 
ing as beautiful and useful an article as he can. 

92, 39. the idolatrous Jews. Ezekiel viii, 7-12. Read the 
passage. 

93, 40. Chalmers. Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), a famous and 
eloquent Scotch minister. 

93.41. the last of our great painters. J. M. W. Turner (1774- 
1851). See Introduction pp. 16, 17. 

94, 41. the gate of a great city of sleeping kings. The fol- 
lowing passage is so closely connected with Isaiah xiv, 4-23, that the 
student must compare the two for himself to get the whole effect. 
The paragraph is in diction one of Ruskin's noblest. Great prcise 
has seldom come nearer to great poetry, and yet remained sound proj-e. 

94.42. Scythian custom. Herodotus's account of the Scythians 
Ruskin tells us in Praeterita, took hold of his boyish imagination. 
He based various poems upon it. 

95, 42. Caina. The first four divisions of the ninth circle of 
Dante's Hell, where traitors ^vere punished. The name is taken from 
Cain, the first murderer (traitor to his own blood). 

95, 42. true lords or kings. "From my own chosen masters, 
then, Scott and Homer, I learned ... a most sincere love of kings, 
and dislike of everybody who attempted to disobey them. Only, 
both by Homer and by Scott, I was taught strange ideas about kings, 
which I find for the present much obsolete; for I perceived that both 
the author of the Iliad and the author of Waverley made their king?, 
or king-loving persons, do harder work than anybody else. Tydidcs 
or Idomeneus always killed twenty Trojans to other people's one, 
and Redsauntlet speared more salmon than any of the Solway fisher- 
men, and — which was particularly a subject of admiration to me— 
I observed that they not only did more, but in proportion to their 
doings (jot less than other people — nay, that the best of them were 
even ready to govern for nothing! and let their followers divide any 
quantity of spoil or profit. Ot late it has seemed to me tnat the idea 
of a king has become exactly the contrary of this, and it has been 
supposed the duty of superior persons generally to govern less, and 
get more, than anybody else." (Praeterita, chap, i.) Cf. note on 
aristocracy, p. 52. 

96, 42. elsewhere. M^inera Pulveris, n22. 

96. 43. " people-Citing." Applied to Agamemnon. Iliad, I, 231. 



Jf^G NOTES 

96,43. **il gran rifiato.** The great refusal (i.e., abdication) 
L)ante, Inferno, Canto ill, L 60. 

97, 44. Trent cuts you a cantel out. Cf. for this and the 
other allusion to Trent below, Shakspere's Henry IV, Part I, Act 
iii, So. I. A cantel is a piece broken off. 

97, 44. " Go, and he gocth.** Matt, viii, 9. 

97, 45. "do and teach.*' Matt, v, 19. 

i97, 45. the moth and the rust, etc. Matt, vi, 19-20, q. v. 

98,45. Fourth kind of treasure. Wisdom. Job xxviii, 12-28. 

98, 45. Athena's. Pallas Athene, or Minerva, goddess of Wis- 
dom. 

98, 45. Vulcanian. Vulcan was the god of fire. 

98, 45. Delphian. Apollo, god of the sun and of light, had his 
shrine at Delphi. 

98, 45. deep-pictured tissue. The embroidered tissue of the 
"web made fair in the weaving" which Ruskin has just referred to. 

98, 45. potable gold. Drinkable gold, gold that might become 
a part of the man. 

98, 45. the three great Angels. Perhaps, symbolically, 
Athena, Vulcan, and Apollo, whom Ruskin elsewhere has called the 
iords respectively of "useful art,'' of "labor," and of "illuminating 
intellectual wisdom." But the imagery is interwoven and tangled; 
analysis almost wrecks it. 

98, 45. the path. Job xxviii, 7. 

98, 46. armies of thinkers. It is not farfetched to find in this 
the root of Ruskin's subsequent Society, the "Company or Guild of 
St. George." Miss A. S. Cook points out the fact that Henry VIII. 
in 1537, chartered the "Fraternity or Guylde of St. George, Maistars 
and Rulars of the Science of Artillery, for long bowes, crosbowes 
.^i,nd Hand-Gonnes," an "army of stabbers" with which Ruskin may 
very well have wished to contrast his own "army of thinkers." (For 
a full account of Ruskin's Guild of St. George, see Fors Clavigera, 
viii and ix.) 

99, 47. the only book. Unto This Last, (Essay 4). 

99, 47. half thorns, etc. Half discomfort, half fear. 

100, 50. corn laws. Protective measures which it was thought 
kept up the price of food; after great agitation under Bright and 
Cobden, they were repealed in 1846. 

101, 50. Sesame, which opens doors. Sesame is a kind of 
grain. In the story of "Ali Baba, or the Forty Thieves," a magic 
treasure-cave remains fast shut to the various demands of, "Open, 
barley!" "Open, wheat!" "Open, corn'" But at the cry of *'Opeii, 
Sesame!" the doors fly apart. 

103. a bye one. A side issue. 
103. clowns. Peasants, laborers. 



NOTES 157 

LECTURE II 

105. Septuagint. The Greek translation of the Old Testament 
(about 280 B. C), said to have been made by seventy (Lat. septua- 
ginta) scholars. 

106, 51. ** likeness of a kingly crown." Paradise Lost, II, G73. 
108, 54. helpmate. Gen. ii, 18. Helpmate derives its meaning 

from a misquotation of this passage. 

108, 55. Let us see whether. The following pages are in part 
an illustration of the chief fault of Ruskin as a teacher, i. e., that his 
passions and pa^rtisanship are likely sometimes to lead him astray. 
To get the judgment of great writers is admirable; but to twist their 
writings, to exaggerate their meaning even a little, is to do exactly wha< 
heinsists we must rjoMo (see Lecture I). And yet here Ruskin himself 
exaggerates and tv/ists. Shakspere's leading male figures are not 
perfectly heroic, because if they were we could have no tragedy; the 
essence of tragedy is the downfall of a great character through some 
flaw. As for the characterization given of the various personages, it 
may be noted that Romeo is far from "impatient," and that the treat- 
ment of jHenry the Fifth is not a "slight sketch." Prospero and 
Brutus, Ruskin does not mention. The women are chosen without 
great discrimination. Julia, Sylvia, Hero, are really mere lay-figures. 
The heroines of Scott, here mentioned, are, except Jeanie Deans and 
Catherine Seyton, conventional, unreal figures, no more heroic than 
the male personages with whom in the novels they are matched. 
Scott's strength as a novelist did not lie in the depiction of "leading 
men" and "leading women," but in the drawing of minor characters — 
whether peasants or kings and queens. Of his heroines, Mrs. Meynell 
says: "These young creatures Scott made virtuous because convention 
required a virtuous maid for the hero to love, and made faultless at 
a blow, because he could not be at the pains to work upon their char- 
acters, t is chilling to hear their intellect and tenderness praised 
in the noble terms of the intellect and tenderness of Imogen, Hermione, 
or Perdita." 

Nevertheless this whole passage is so finely phrased and rings so 
true with a noble affection for woman, that no one would wish it 
unsaid. 

For the plays and stories in which the various characters appear, 
see Webster, the Century Dictionary, or any dictionary of fiction. 

113, 60. Dante's great poem. The Divine Comedy is in a 
sense dedicated to the memory of Beatrice Portinari, the love of 
Dante's youth. 

114, 60. a knight of Pisa, Pannucio dal Pagno Pasano'. The 
poem is translated in Rossetti's Early Italian Poets. Dante Ga- 
briel Rossetti (1828-1882) was a distinguished English painter and 
poet of Italian parentage. 

115, 61. Greek women. Cf. any dictionary for the names. 

116, 62. Chaucer. The first great English poet. The Legend 



158 NOTES 

of Good Women does not concern itself entirely with women whom 
we should call good; it includes, for example, the stories of Medea 
and Cleopatra. Does this aflfect the argument? 

116, 62. Spenser. Edmund Spenser, contemporarj- with Shak- 
spere. The characters named are from his greatest work, the Faerie 
Queene. Una represents Truth (Book I); Britomart. Chastity 
(Book III). 

116, 62. Law-giver. Moses. Cf. Exodus ii, 10. 

116, 62. Spirit of Wisdom. The goddess Neith. 

116, 62. olive-helm and cloudy shield. Sjonbolic of wisdom 
working in peace and war, and throughout the processes of nature 
(Ruskin's own interpretation). 

118,65. '* Ah, wasteful woman I" From The Angel in the 
House. Patmore, like Spenser, is called a "poet's poet" — that is, 
one dearer to other poets than to the general public. He wrote some 
high and noble verse, as the passage here quoted shows. 

121, 68. vestal temple. Vesta was the Roman goddess of the 
home. 

121, 68. Household Gods. The Lares and Penates, whose tem- 
ples were the houses of the Romans. 

121, 68. shade as of the rock. Isaiah xxxii, 2, 

121, 68. the Pharos. A lighthouse on the island of Pharos at 
the entrance of the harbor of Alexandria. 

121, 68. ceiled with cedar. Jeremiah xxii, 14. 

122, 69. *'La donna e mobile," not "qual pium' al vento;** 
'*Woman is changeful" but not "as a feather in the wind.'* From 
Verdi's opera of "Rigoletto." 

122,69. *• Variable as the shade.'* Scott's 3/armion, vi, 30. 

123, 70. that poet. Wordsworth (1770-1850). 

124, 71. *• A countenance," etc. From Wordsworth's "She was 
a Phantom of Delight." 

125, 72. Valley of Humiliation. Into which Christian goes 
down, in The Pilgrim's Progress. 

125, 72. children, gathering pebbles on a boundless shore. 
Sir Isaac Newton, the great English physicist, is reported to have 
said, near the close of his long career: "I have been only gathering 
pebbles on the shore of the great Ocean of Truth that stretches out 
before me." 

126.72. **for all who are desolate." The English Book of 
Common Prayer reads: "That it may please thee to defend and pro- 
vide for the fatherless children, and widows, and all who are desolate 
and oppressed." 

127.73. There is one dangerous science. There can be little 
doubt that in this passage Ruskin is thinking of his mother, and the 
influence her somewhat narrow theolog^^ exercised over his own life. 
See Introduction, pp. 11, 12. 



NOTES 159 

1275 73. consecrated myrrh. Myrrh was used in the Jewish 
ritual of sacrifice. 

127, 73. Spirit of the Comforter. John xiv, 26. 

128, 74. hers, general. Ruskin is not thinking of the modern 

^ woman, earning her own hving. He has called his book "old-fash- 
ioned." 
129, 77. Thackeray. Thackeray was a friend of Ruskin's, but 
Ruskin never* liked the influence of his books. 

131, 78. ** Her household motions,*' etc. Also from Words- 
worth's Phantom of Delight. 

133, 81. Dean of Christchurch . . . Master of Trinity. 
Heads of colleges, Christchurch (Ruskin's own college) at Oxford, 
Trinity at Cambridge. 

134, 82. German Diets. The legislative assemblies of lords of 
church and state which constituted the highest political authority in 
Germany. 

135, 83. sharp arrows. Cf. Psalms cxx, 3-4. Ruskin means 
that these " furnaces," the great manufactories, seem to give England 
power, but their real result wnll be burning shame and anguish. 
"Coals of juniper'' were supposed to be hotter than coals of other 
wood. 

135, 84. Parnassus. The Nine Muses of Greek legend had their 
home on Mt. Parnassus. Snowdon is the most famous and beautiful 
mountain in Wales. 

135, 84. Island of Aegina. On which Pallas Athene (= Minerva; 
see note, p. 156) had a temple. 

135, 85. Christian Minerva. Christian culture and education. 

136, 85. as sheep having no shepherd. Matt, ix, 36. 

136, 85. inch-deep fonts. Refers to the vessels of water for 
baptism placed in English churches. 

136, 85. the great Lawgiver. God, likened to Moses, in Exodus 
xvii, 6. 

137, 85. Unknown God. Cf. Acts xvii, 23. 

138, 87. power of the royal hand. The touch of the king's 
hand was of old supposed to cure various diseases. Dr. Samuel 
Johnson, the eighteenth century literary dictator, was in his 
childhood taken to be "touched" by Queen Anrie to heal his scrofula. 
Unfortunately the results were negative. 

139, ^8. Lady means "breadgiver." Ruskin 's etymology here 
has been vigorously assailed. According to Skeat's Etymological 
Dictionary, "lady" means "loaf-kneader," "lord" means "loaf- 
keeper," i.e., master of the house. 

139, 88. poor representatives of her Master. Cf . Matt, xxv, 40. 

139, 88. ministering to Him of their substance. Luke viii 
2-3. 

140, 88. In breaking of bread. At the supper at Emmaus 
Luke xxiv, 31. 



160 NOTES 

141, 90. the myrtle crown. The myrtle was sacred to Venus, 
goddess of beauty. 

141, 90. "Prince of Peace." Isaiah ix, 6. 

141,91. *' Dei gratia." By the grace of God. The words form 
part of the formal title of various European sovereigns, including that 
of the King of England. 

142, 92. I tell you. Note the growth in length and power of 
the sentences as the paragraph proceeds, till the final splendid close. 

142, 92. Chrysolite. 

" If heaven had made me such another world 
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, 

I'd not have sold her for it." (Oihello, Act v, Sc. 2, 1. 145.) 
143,93. "Her feet have touched," etc. From Tennyson's 
Maud. Cf. also Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. 

" Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, 
And fragrance in thy footing treads." 

143, 94. " Even the light harebell," etc. From Scott's Lady 
of the Lake, Canto I, 1. 18. (Shghtly misquoted.) 

144, 94. only. Note the position of the word. What is its force? 

144, 94. " Come, thou south." Song of Solomon, iv, 16. 

145, 94. frantic Dances of Death. Ruskin's note at the foot 
of the page makes his reference here plain. He was probably led to 
use this particular phrase by a memory of the Dutch painter Hol- 
bein's "Dance of Death," a series of woodcuts illustrating the constant 
nearness of death in all the activities of hfe. 

145, 94. English poet's lady. The "Maud" of Tennyson. 
Maud is an abbreviated form of Matilda. "The great Matilda" of 
Dante was Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, who guides him on part of 
his way through Purgatory. 

145, 94. Lethe. The river whose waters took away the memory 
of sin, allowing the happy soul to enter the next world unstained. 

145, 94. " Come into the garden, Maud." As before, from 
Tennyson; as are the two quotations a few lines further on. 

146, 95. Madeleine. Mary Magdalene, John xx, 11-18. 

146, 95. Sought Him in vain, all through the night. Song 
of Solomon, iii, 1. 

146, 95. that old Garden. The Garden of Eden. Cf. Genesis, 
iii, 24. 

146, 95. the vine has flourished. Song of Solomon, vi, 11. 

146, 95. sanguine. Red. 

146, 95. Take us the foxes. Song of Solomon, xi, 15. •'Us" 
is here used in the dative — take for us. 

146, 95. the foxes have holes, etc. This passage is a mosaic 
of biblical references. Cf. Matt, viii, 20; Luke xix, 40: Genesis 
xxviii, 10-11. 




APPENDIX 

(Adapted, and enlarged, from the Manual for the Study 
K of English Classics, by George L. Marsh) 

r 



HELPS TO STUDY 

Euskin's Career 



When was Ruskin born? What were the station and the 
character of his parents (p. 10) ? 

To what circumstances of Ruskin ^g youth may prominent 
characteristics of him as a man and a writer be attributed 
(pp. 12 ff.) ? Note especially the nature of the chief reading 
of his youth, and illustrate its influence upon his writings. 

Tell something of Ruskin 's early travels and their effect 
upon him (p. 15). 

Where did Ruskin receive his university training, and what 
were the most noteworthy events of his university life (pp. 
16, 17) ? What relations did he later have with the univer- 
sity (p. 24) ? 

What was Ruskin ^s first book and when was it published 
(p, 17) ? What was its main purpose? Note Ruskin 's later 
attitude toward his early work, and his reason for it. 

What important books on architecture did Ruskin write, 
and what were the fundamental principles he laid down for 
great architecture (p. 20) ? 

When did Ruskin turn from art criticism (p. 22)? Why? 
Into what field of work? What were his most important con- 
tentions (pp. 22 ff.)? 

What' were the main occupations of his later life (pp. 
24 ff.)? 

When did he die? 

Perry Picture 102 is a portrait of Ruskin. 
161 



162 APPENDIX 

Sesame and Lilies — General Questions 

When was Sesame and Lilies written? For what purpose 
or purposes? What is its position among Euskin's works 
(p. 23) ? 

Make an outline of each of the lectures, amplifying the 
hints as to logical structure given on pages 31 ff. of the 
editor's Introduction. 

What is the meaning of the titles of the separate lectures? 
Of the title of the whole book? What criticism may be 
made of the titles? What defense of them? Where does 
Euskin explain or defend them? What do you think of the 
explanation or the defense? 

What are the main points in the Preface of 1882 (pp. 39 
ff.) as to the persons for whom Sesame and Lilies was in- 
tended, and its relations to Euskin 's principal teachings? 
Comparison of this Preface with that of 1871 is interesting. 

Do you find any hint in these lectures of Euskin 's funda- 
mental art principles: that art must be true to the facts of 
nature, not to the conventionalitiea of previous art; that 
esthetics and ethics are vitally related, good art being possible 
only to an artist who is morally good? 

Point out examples in Sesame and Lilies of Euskin 's views 
of political economy: that the whole competitive system is 
wrong, and machinery harmful rather than useful. 

What indications of intended oral delivery are there in 
the lectures? Note the effort made by the lecturer to get 
himself and his audience on a common footing, the frequent 
rhetorical questions, etc. Are the sentences short enough for 
comprehension by an ordinary hearer? 

Pick out some of the most eloquent passages (as sections 
41, 42, Q%^ 92, etc.), and make a detailed study of them such 
as Euskin himself makes of the passage from Lycidas (see 
sections 20 ff.). Can you account in every case f or" the pe- 
culiar effectiveness you find? 

Note the most striking uses of satire or irony that you 
find. What are the principal objects of the satire? 



APPENDIX 163 

m Point out some of the most effective concrete examples by 
l^i^hich Ruskin makes his points. 

Illustrate the various characteristics of Ruskin 's style as 
described in the editor's Introduction (pp. 29 ff.). Examine 
some of the longest sentences you find, and decide whether 
or not they are clear. Is the grammatical construction ever 
obscure or even faulty? (See, for example, an error in sec- 
tion 33.) 

Where do you find balance and antithesis used notably? 
Compare these lectures in this respect with ^ ^ Work ^ ' in The 
Crown of Wild Olive, or with essays by Macaulay. 

Note striking figures of speech (as in section 43). Are 
they characterized mainly by beauty or by strength? 

Questions on Details 

State the main point of Ruskin 's comment on the popular 
desire for ^'advancement in life'' (sections 2-5). 

What is the purpose and the effect of the direct appeal to 
the audience in section 5 ? Can anything definite be assumed 
from the action of the audience? 

Compare Ruskin 's general comments on books (sections 
6 ff.) with Bacon's Essay ''Oi Studies," or with Milton's 
Areopagitica (see Newcomer and Andrews, Twelve Centuries 
of English Poetry and Prose, pp. 212, 263). 

What is the main division Ruskin makes of books (sections 
8 ff.) ? The basis of his distinction? What are the princi- 
pal kinds of books in the respective classes? 

What very important principle for reading and interpre- 
tation and criticism is contained in section 13? 

What are the most important considerations in Ruskin 's 
discussion of words (sections 15 ff.) ? Compare the treat- 
ment of diction in a textbook on rhetoric ; for instance, Chap- 
ters XII-XVIII, inclusive, in Herrick and Damon's New 
Composition and Rhetoric. 

What are the purpose and effect of the long discussion of 
the passage from Lycidas (sections 20 ff.)? Compare with 



164 APPENDIX 



1 



the notes on Lycidas in the Lake Classics edition of Milton 's 
Minor Poems, 

Comment on section 25 as a paragraph. Has it unity! 
If so, under what topic? Study other long paragraphs in a 
similar way. How about the short paragraphs in section 22? ■ 
What is their purpose? ■ 

What is Ruskin^s attitude toward feeling, or *' passion, 
or 'sensation' '' (section 27)? Note illustrations of this 
attitude in his own life. 

Sum up Euskin 's most important criticisms of the English 
nation and the English people as individuals (as in section 
31, etc.). What specific activities are criticized? 

What important views on religion do you find expressed 
(as in section 37) ? Can you account for them in what the 
editor says about Ruskin^s early training (pp. 11 ff.) ? 

What interesting comment does Suskin make on his own 
work (section 47) ? 

What important views of war are expressed (as in sections 
47, 48, etc.)? Compare with the lecture on ''War'' in The 
Crown of Wild Olive; or compare with Carlyle's view of war 
in Sartor Besartus. 

What erroneous notions as to the relations of men and 
women does Ruskin especially criticize (as in section 54, 
etc.)? Compare Tennyson's views in The Princess with 
Ruskin 's. 

Summarize the important comments on Shakspere (sec- 
tions 56 ff.), and on Scott (sections 59 ff.). What other 
important authors does Ruskin mention or quote? For in- 
stance, note the important comment on Wordsworth in sec- 
tion 70. 

What is Ruskin 's attitude toward chivalry; toward 
romance ? 

Outline the course of education Ruskin suggests for girls 
(sections 72 ff.). Wherein chiefly does it differ from the 
education he recommends for boys? 



APPENDIX 165 

THEME SUBJECTS 

1. Ituskin's life (pp. 9-25). 

2. Buskin's childhood (especially in relation to his later 
life and work; pp. 9-15). 

3. Ruskin'g work in art criticism (including architec- 
ture; pp. 16-21). 

4. Buskin 's economic and social work (pp. 21-24, 27-29 ; 
with reference also to the expression of his views in the book 
studied). 

5. Discussion of the merits and demerits of the titles of 
the separate lectures and of the work as a whole (pp. 47, 
107, etc.). 

6. Brief outlines or condensed summaries of the two 
lectures (amplifying the editor's hints on pp. 30, 31). 

7. Minute discussion of a short passage from some 
poem studied in the English course (similar to Buskin's dis- 
cussion, pp. 60 ff.). 

8. What Buskin thinks of novels and novel-reading (pp. 
49, 129 ff.). 

9. Does America today despise literature, science, art, 
nature, compassion (pp. 77-91)1 Discuss, with reference to 
your own city, any or all of Buskin 's charges. 

10. Amusements of which Buskin disapproves (pp. 91, 
etc.). (A defense, or a criticism, of his attitude toward 
some specific amusement might be attempted.) 

11. Themes developing and explaining, or criticizing (cf. 
p. 157) Buskin's comments on some of the characters from 
Shakspere and Scott; e. g., Orlando, Bosalind, Ophelia. 

12. How girls should be educated, according to Buskin 
(pp. 122 ff.). Compare your own education. 

13. Comparison of Buskin's view of the true position of 
woman in society (pp. 119-22, 137 ff.) with the view of Ten- 
nyson as expressed in The Princess. 

14. The objects of satire in these lectures. 



166 APPENDIX 



SELECTIONS FOR CLASS READING 

1. The choice of friends (pp. 46-48). 

2. What is a *'true book'' (pp. 49-52). 

3. Intensive reading (pp. 55-57). 

4. Passion, or ^ ^ sensation ' ' (pp. 71-73). 

5. Characteristics of a *^ gentle nation'' (pp. 77-84), 

6. Treatment of the poor (pp. 88-91). 

7. The public craving for amusement (pp. 91-94). 

8. True greatness in life (pp. 94-99). 

9. The purpose of the lecture **0f Queens' Gardens" 
(pp. 106-8). 

10. Shakspere's women (pp. 108-11). 

11. Scott's women (pp. 111-13). 

12. Other great women in literature (pp. 113-16). 

13. Chivalry toward women (pp. 117, 118). 

14. Differences between men and women (pp. 120-22). 

15. The first duty in the education of women (pp. 122-26). 

16. Differences between education for girls and for boys 
(pp. 127-33). 

17. The help of nature in education (pp. 133-35). 

18. Woman's duty in the state (pp. 137, 138). 

19. Woman's influence (pp. 140-46). 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 

tin the following parallel columns are given the most impor- 
tant dates in the history of English and American literature, 
from the time of Shakspere down to 1900. Special care has 
been taken to include the classics commonly read in high 
schools, so tnat the historical background of any given classic 
will be apparent from the table: 



AMERICAN 



ENGLISH 

1594-5 Shakspere : Midsummer 

Night's Dream, 
1596 (or earlier): Romeo arid 
Juliet. 

1598 (or earlier) : The Mer- 

chant of Venice. 

1599 Henry V. 
1599-1600 As You Like It, 



1601-1700 



1607 Jamestown founded. 

1608 J. Smith : A True Rela- 

tion. 

1610 Strachey: A True Rep- 
ortory. 



1620 Plymouth Colony founded. 



1601 Julius CcBsar. 

1602 Hamlet; Twelfth Night 

(acted). 

1603 Queen Elizabeth died. 
1605 Bacon : Advancement of 

Learning. 



1610 



1611 



1612 

1614 

1616 
1620 



Shakspere : Macbeth 
(acted). 

The Tempest (acted). 

*'K i n g James" Bible 
printed. 

Bacon : Essays (first edi- 
tion, 1597). 

Raleigh : History of 
the World, 

Shakspere died. 

Bacon : Novum Organum, 



167 



168 



APPENDIX 



AMERICAN 



1624 J. Smith : The General 
History of Virginia. 

1630 Massachusetts Bay Col- 
ony founded. 

Bradford : History of 
Plimoth Plantation be- 
gun about this time. 

Winthrop : Journal be- 
gun, ended 1649. 



1635 R. Mather : Journal 

(written). 

1636 Harvard College estab- 

lished. 
1638 New Haven founded. 



1640 The Bay Psalm Book, 



1644 Williams: The Bloudy 
Tenent. 



1650 A. Bradsti-eet : PoenirS, 



1662 



Wigglesworth : The' Day 
of Doom. 



1681 

1682 

1689 
1692 



C. Mather: Diary begun. 

Philadelphia founded. 

King William's War. 
Salem witchcraft trials. 



1623 



1627 



Shakspere : Plays (first 
folio edition). 



Drayton ; 
court. 



Ballad of Agin- 



1633 Milton : L' Allegro and II 

Penseroso. 

1634 Milton: Comus (acted). 



1638 Trial of John Hampd^. 
Milton : Lycidas (pub- 
lished). 



1642 


Theaters closed. 




Browne : Religio Medici, 


1644 


Milton : Areopagitica. 




Battle of Marston Moor. 


1648 


Herrick : Hesperides. 


1649 


Charles I executed. 


1653 


Walton : The Compleat 




Angler. 


1660 


The monarchy restored. 



Pepys : Diary begun, end- 
ed 1669. 



1666 London fire. 

1667 Milton: Paradise Lost. 

1671 Milton : Paradise Re- 
gained; Samson Agon- 
istes. 

1674 Milton died. 
1678 Bunyan: Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress. 

1681 Dryden : Ahsalom and 

Achitophel. 

1682 Dryden : MacFlecknoe, 
1688 The English Revolution. 



1697 



Dryden 
Feast. 



Alexander's 



APPENDIX 
1701-1800 



169 



AMERICAN 



1701 Yale College established. 
1702-13 Queen Anne's War. 

1702 C. Mather : Magnolia 

Chris ti Americana. 
1704 Boston News Letter estab- 
lished. 



1722 Edwards : Diarp begun. 



1732 Washington born. 

1733 Franklin : Poor Richard's 

Almanac (begun). 

1741 Edwards: Sinners in the 
Hands of an Angry 
Qod, 



1700 
1702 

1704 

1709 

1711 

1712 

1714 
1715 

i719 
1722 

1726 

1728 
1732 



ENGLISH 

Dryden : Fables ("Pala- 
mon and Arcite," etc.). 



Queen Anne 
throne. 



ascended 



Swift : Tale of a Tut, 



The 



The 



Steele and Addison : 

Tatler begun. 
Steele and Addison: 

Spectator begun. 

Pope : The Rape of the 
Lock, 

Queen Anne died. 

Pope : Translation of the 

Iliad (Books I-IV). 
Defoe : Robinson Crusoe, 
Defoe : Journal of the 

Plague Year. 
Swift : (Quiver's Travels, 
Thomson : Winter, 
Pope : Dunciad. 
Pope : Essay on Man. 



1740 Richardson : Pamela, 



1755 Braddock's defeat. 

1756 Woolman : Journal (be- 

gun). 
1758 Franklin : The Way to 
Wealth in Poor Rich- 
ard's Almanac. 



1742 

1744 
1747 

1748 

1749 
1750 

1751 

1755 



Fielding : 
drews. 



Joseph An- 



Death of Pope. 

Gray : Ode on Eton Col- 
lege. 

Richardson : Clarissa 
Harlowe. 

Fielding : Tom Jones. 

Johnson: The Rambler 
(begun). 

Gray : Elegy Written in 
a Country Churchyard. 

jobticon : English Dic- 
tionary. 



170 



APPENDIX 



AMERICAN 



1765 Godfrey : Juvenile Poems 
(with The Prince of 
Parthia, the first Amer- 
ican drama). 
The Stamp Act. 



1771 Franklin : Autobiography, 

first part, written. 
1773 P. Wheatley : Poems. 

1775 Trumbull : M'Fingal. 

Henr,^ : Speech in the 
Virginia Convention. 

1776 The Declaration of Inde- 

pendence. 
Paine : Common Sense. 

1783 The Treaty of Paris. 

1785 Dwight : The Conquest 

of Canaan. 

1786 Freneau : Poems. 

1789 Franklin : Autobiography, 
second part, written. 



1796 Washington : Farewell 

Address. 
1798 Brown: Wieland. 

J. Hopkinson : Hail 
Columbia. 



ENGLISH 

1759 Sterne : Tristram Shandy 

(begun). 
Johnson : Rasselas. 

1760 King George III on 

throne. 
1762 Macpherson : The Poems 
of Ossian. 

1764 Walpole : The Castle of 

Otranto. 
Goldsmith : The Traveler. 

1765 Percy : Relique-s of An- 

cient Poetry. 



1766 Goldsmith : Vicar of 
Wakefield. 

1770 Goldsmith : Deserted Vil- 

lage. 

1771 Encyclopedia Britannica, 

first edition. 
1773 Goldsmith : She Stoops 
to Conquer (acted). 

1775 Burke : Speech on Con- 

ciliation. 
Sheridan : The Rivals. 

1776 Gibbon : Decline and Fall 

of Rom<in Empire. 

1779 Johnson: LAves of the 

Poets. 
1783 Crabbe : The Village. 

1785 Cowper : The Tosh. 

1786 Burns : Poems, 

1789 Blake : Songs of Inno- 
cence. 

1791 Boswell: Life of Dr. 
Johnson. 



1798 Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge : Lyrical Ballads 
('*The Ancient Mari- 
ner," etc.). 



1801-1900 



1803 The Louisiana Purchase. 



1805 Scott: Lay of the LoMt 

Minstrel. 
1 S08 Scott : Marmion. 



APPENDIX 



171 



AMERICAN 

1809 Irving : Knickerbocker*9 
History of New York. 



1812-14 War with England. 



1814 Key : The Star-Spa/ngled 

Banner. 

1815 Freneau : Poems, 



1817 Bryant : Thanatopaia. 



1819 Drake : The American 

Flag. 

1820 Irving : The Sketch Book, 
The Missouri Compromise. 



1821 



1822 
1823 



1824 
1825 
1826 



1827 



Cooper : The Spy. 

Bryant : Poems. 

Irving : Bracebridge Hall. 

Payne : Home, Sweet 
Home, 

Cooper: The Pilot. 

Irving : Tales of a Trav- 
eler. 

Webster : The Bunker 
Hill Monument. 

Cooper : The Last of the 
Mohicans. 

P o e : Tamerlane and 
Other Poems. 



1831 Poe : Poems, 

1832 Irving: The Alhambra. 
S. F. Smith : America. 

1833 Poe: MS. Found in a 

Bottle. 



ENGLISH 

1809 Byron : English Bards 

and Scotch Reviewers. 

1810 Scott : The Lady of the 

Lakp. 

1811 J. Austen : Sense and 

Sensibility, 

1812 Byron : Childe Harold, 

I. II. 

1813 Southey : Life of Nelson. 

1814 Scott : Wuverley. 
Wordsworth : The Excur- 
sion. 

1815 The Battle of Waterloo. 

1816 Byron : The Prisoner of 

Chillon; Childe Harold, 
III. 
Coleridge : Christabel. 

1817 Keats : Poems (first col- 

lection). 

1818 Byron : Childe Harold, 

IV. 

1819 Scott : Ivanhoe. 



1820 Keats : Poems. 
Shelley : Prometheus Un- 
bound. 

1821 Shelley : Adonais. 

De Quincey : Confessions 
of an Opium Eater. 

1823 Scott : Quentin Durward 
Lamb : Essays of Elia. 

1824 Landor : Imaginary Co ti 

versations. 

1825 Macaulay : Essay on Mil- 

ton. 



1827 A. and C. Tennyson : 

Poems by Two Broth- 
ers. 

1828 Carlyle : Essay on Burns. 
1830 Tennyson : Poems Chiefly 

Lyrical. 



1832 Death of Scott; The Re- 

form Bill. 

1833 Carlyle: Sartor Resart us. 
Tennyson : Poems. 
V\vo\\\\\\\\* : Vaulinc. 



172 



APPENDIX 



Poems, 

Nature. 

The American 



AMERICAN 

1835 Drake : The Culprit Fay, 

etc. 

1836 Holmes : 
Emerson : 

1837 Emerson : 

Scholar, 
Hawthorne : Ttoice-Told 

Tales, first series. 
Whittier: Poems, 
1839 Poe : Tales of the Grotes- 
que and Aral>esque, 

Longfellow : Voices of the 
Night. 

1840. Dana : Two Tears Before 
the Mast, 

1841 Emerson : Essays, first 

series. 
Longfellow : Ballads and 
Other Poems. 

1842 Hawthorne : Twice-Told 

Tales, second series. 



1843 Poe : The Qold-Bug, 

Prescott : Conquest of 
Mexico. 



1844 Emerson : Essays, second 

series. 
Lowell : Poems, 

1845 Poe : The Raven and 

Other Poems. 

1846 Hawthorne : Mosses from 

an Old Manse, 
1846-48 War with Mexico. 

1847 Emerson : Poems. 
Longfellow: Evangeline, 
Parkman : The Oregon 

Trail, 

1848 Lowell : Vision of Sir 

Launfal. 

1849 Irving: Oliver Goldsmith, 



1850 Emerson : Representative 
Men, 
Hawthorne: The Soarlei 
Letter, 



ENGLISH 

1835 Browning : Paracelsus. 

1836 Dickens : Pickwick Pa- 

pers. 

1837 Victoria became Queen. 
De Quincey : Revolt of 

the Tartars. 
C a r 1 y 1 e : The French 
Revolution, 



1840 Macaulay : Essay on 

Clive. 

1841 Browning : Pippa Passes. 
Macaulay : Essay on War- 
ren Hastings, 

1842 Macaulay: Lays cf An- 

cient Rome, 
Browning : Dramatic 
Lyrics, 

1843 Dickens : A Christmas 

Carol, 

Macaulay : Essay on Ad- 
dison. 

Ruskin : Modern Painters. 
Vol. I. 

1844 E. B. Browning: Poems. 



1845 Browning : Dramatic Ro- 

mances and Lyrics, 

1846 Dickens : The Cricket on 

the Hearth, 

1847 De Quincey : Joan of Arc, 
Tennyson: The Princess, 
Thackeray : Vanity Fair. 
C. Bronte : Jane Eyre, 

1848 Macaulay : History of 

England, I, II. 

1849 De Quincey : The English 

Mail Cjoach, 
M. Arnold : The Strayed 
Reveller, etc. 

1850 Tennyson.: In Memoriam, 
Dickens : David Copper- 
field. 



APPENDIX 



173 



1851 



1852 



AMERICAN 

Hawthorne : The House 
of the Seven Gables, 

Parkman : The Conspir- 
acy of Pontiac, 

Mrs. Stowe : Uncle Tom's 
Cabin, 



1854 Thoreau : Walden, 

1855 Longfellow : Hiawatha. 
Whitman : Leaves of 

Grass, 

1856 Motley : Rise of the Dutch 

Republic. 
Curtis : Prue and I. 



1858 Longfellow : Courtship of 
Miles Standish. 
Holmes : Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table, 



1861-65 The avll War. 



1862-66 Lowell : BiglotD Pa- 
pers, IL 

1863 Longfellow : Tales of a 
Wayside Inn, 



1865 Whitman : Drum Taps. 

1866 Whlttler : Snow-Bound. 



ENGLISH 

1851 Thackeray : Lectures on 

English Humorists. 
G, Meredith : Poems, 

1852 Thackeray : Henry Es- 

mond, 

1853 M. Arnold: Poems 

("Sohrab and Rustum," 
etc.). 
Mrs. Gaskell : Oranford, 

1855 R. Browning : Men and 

Women, 
Tennyson : Maud, 

1856 Macaulay : E s s ay s on 

Johnson and Goldsmith, 
Mrs. Browning : Aurora 
Leigh. 

1857 Hughes : Tom Brown's 

School Days, 



1859 


Tennyson : Idylls of the 

King, 
Dickens : A Tale of Two 

Cities, 






G, Eliot : Adam Bede. 




Meredith : Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel, 


1860 


Darwin : The Origin of 

Species, 
G. Eliot: The Mill on 

the Floss, 


1861 


G, Eliot: Silas Marner. 



Reade : The Cloister and 

the Hearth. 
Palgrave : The Golden 

Treasury, 



1862 


Meredith : Modem Love, 
etc. 


1863 


G. Eliot : Romola. 


1864 


Browning : Dramatis Per- 
sonw. 


1865 


Swinburne : Atalanta in 

Calydon, 
R u s k i n : Sesame and 

Lilies. 


1866 


Ruskin : A Crown of Wild 
Olive. 



174 



APPENDIX 



1S6S 



1S70 
1S71 

1ST3 
1S76 
1877 

1S79 
1881 



1SS6 
1887 

1888 

1890 
1891 



AMERICAN 

Hale : The Man Without 
a Country, etc. 



Bret Harte : The Luck 
of Roaring Camp, etc. 

Howells : Their Wedding 
Journey. 



Aldrich 

etc. 
Mark Twain 

yer. 
Lanier : Poems. 



Marjorie Daic, 
Tom SaiC- 



Cable : Old Creole Days. 
Stockton : Rudder Grange. 



Whittler : 
Missive. 



The King's 



H. Jackson : Si)nnet8 and 

Lyrics. 
M. E. Wilkins : A Humble 

Romance, etc. 

Whitman: yovem'ber 
Boughs. 



E. Dickinson : Poems, 

first series. 
Whitman : Goodbye, My 

Fancy. 



1898 War with Spaiu. 



XKGLISH 
1868 BrowniDg : The Ring and 

the Book. 
1868-70 Morris : The Earthly 

Paradise. 
1S69 Tennyson. The H oly \ 

Grail, etc. 

1870 D. G. Pwossetti : Poems, i 

1871 Swinburne : Bongs Before \ 

Sunrise, 
1S72 Tennyson : Gareth and 

Lynette, etc. 
1873 Arnold : Literature and 

Dogma. 
1876 Morris : Sigurd the Vol- 

sung. 

1878 Stevenson : An Inland 

Voyage. 

1879 Stevenson : Travels %cith 

a Donkey, 
Meredith : The Egoist. 

1881 D. G. Rossetti : Ballade 

and Sonnets, 

1882 Stevenson : Netc Arabian 

Xights. 

1883 Stevenson : Treasure Is- 

land. 

1886 Stevenson : Kidnapped. 

1887 Stevenson : The Merry 

Men r'M a r k h e i m,'* 

etc.). 
ISSS Kipling: Pla4n Tales 

from the EiUs. 
Barrier Auld Licht 

Idylls. 
18S9 Browning : Asolando. 



1891 Kipling : Life's Handi- 
cap. 

1592 Tennyson died. 

1593 Conington : Translation 

of Aeneid published. 
Barrie : Two of Them, 

1901 Queen Victoria died. 



X107 






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